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40 GB harddrive reporting only 2 GB free

B

BatmanNate

Lifer
My girlfriend's computer has a single 40gb HD. It has only one partition, formatted NTFS, which occupies 37.xx usable gigabytes. According to windows XP, only about 2 GB is available. However, when I browse drive C and select everything, right click, and do properties, only about 20 GB worth of data shows up.

- System files are not hidden
- NAV 2k4 and Spybot with updates have been run
- The page file is only taking up about 700mb

Any ideas? I'm sure that this is probably something simple, but I can't seem to see it. The machine was fine when I set it up some months ago, and recently two of the other computers on her network have had virus related problems, but if that was the case with this, why wouldn't NAV pick it up? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
 
Wait.

I've seen this before in the past, albeit not so severe. I have Norton SystemWorks 2002 on my machines, and the application sometimes detects large chunks of data that were erased, theoretically, and the Recycle Bin was empty, yet they were still taking up space.

Get Norton SystemWorks - at least as a demo - and you might recover the lost space. Or any utility that really deletes the files, and cleans up the machine.
 
Super Large Page File? Actually, Page File would probably show up with the right click properties?
 
Try this:

Run a check on the disk, the MFT might need "adjusting": Start -> Run -> chkdsk /f (answer yes to check on next restart). I've found on some customer's machines at work that although the drive is reporting a small amount of space free, there's actually a lot more there, and the MFT just hasn't "seen" it.

Is the filesystem FAT32? I'm wondering if there's millions of very small files there that are creating a lot of slack space in the filesystem.

[Edit] Didn't realise you'd already got the folder sizes 😱
 
Open up a command prompt and run "dir \ /a/s". See what that says is space available/taken.

If you have Norton Systemworks, check the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. That can store huge amounts of stuff that may not show up in Explorer.

Did you convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS? Run a chkdsk with no /f option. At the end, look at "bytes in each allocation unit". This should be 4096 (it might be 2048 or 8192). If it's 65,536, then that is a big problem since every file is taking up at least 64 K (and can only occupy 64 K size blocks).

Also, I suggest running an online virus scanner like [l]http://housecall.antivirus.com/[/l] I don't expect it to find anything, but it's a good idea to run it due to the local virus activity.
 
This is a known problem area if you are using Windows ME or higher. There are a lot of useful articles on the www.microsoft.com site under memory. I have them written down at my other shop. Will try to post them here later tomorrow. We worked on this for two weeks on a number of computers (all HP, in our case) before we discovered. Search microsoft under memory utilization. Norton Utilities and other utilities will give you different reports than what Microsoft does.
 
Originally posted by: Ryoga
Open up a command prompt and run "dir \ /a/s". See what that says is space available/taken.

If you have Norton Systemworks, check the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. That can store huge amounts of stuff that may not show up in Explorer.

Did you convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS? Run a chkdsk with no /f option. At the end, look at "bytes in each allocation unit". This should be 4096 (it might be 2048 or 8192). If it's 65,536, then that is a big problem since every file is taking up at least 64 K (and can only occupy 64 K size blocks).

Also, I suggest running an online virus scanner like [l]http://housecall.antivirus.com/[/l] I don't expect it to find anything, but it's a good idea to run it due to the local virus activity.
Click to expand...

Did the dir /a /s /p to no avail yesterday, with a variety of other switches to try and pin down hidden files but there were just too many to sort through, although nothing irregular. Drive is NTFS. These symptoms aren't indicitive of cluster size problem, and the drive has been formatted NTFS the entire time anyhow. The system does have a Norton protected recycle bin however, that could be it. It's emptyed, but is there any way it might still be hording things?
 
Originally posted by: raybay
This is a known problem area if you are using Windows ME or higher. There are a lot of useful articles on the www.microsoft.com site under memory. I have them written down at my other shop. Will try to post them here later tomorrow. We worked on this for two weeks on a number of computers (all HP, in our case) before we discovered. Search microsoft under memory utilization. Norton Utilities and other utilities will give you different reports than what Microsoft does.
Click to expand...

😕

This isn't really a memory/vm utilization issue, merely one of hard drive space. The system is running XP and formatted NTFS (see OP).
 
Originally posted by: BatmanNate
Originally posted by: Ryoga
Open up a command prompt and run "dir \ /a/s". See what that says is space available/taken.

If you have Norton Systemworks, check the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. That can store huge amounts of stuff that may not show up in Explorer.

Did you convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS? Run a chkdsk with no /f option. At the end, look at "bytes in each allocation unit". This should be 4096 (it might be 2048 or 8192). If it's 65,536, then that is a big problem since every file is taking up at least 64 K (and can only occupy 64 K size blocks).

Also, I suggest running an online virus scanner like [l]http://housecall.antivirus.com/[/l] I don't expect it to find anything, but it's a good idea to run it due to the local virus activity.
Click to expand...

Did the dir /a /s /p to no avail yesterday, with a variety of other switches to try and pin down hidden files but there were just too many to sort through, although nothing irregular. Drive is NTFS. These symptoms aren't indicitive of cluster size problem, and the drive has been formatted NTFS the entire time anyhow. The system does have a Norton protected recycle bin however, that could be it. It's emptyed, but is there any way it might still be hording things?
Click to expand...
Right click the Recycle Bin, go to properties and purge all Norton protected files.
 
There are actually viruses that do this you know guys. They inflate a 10KB file into one that's like 10GB or even larger. I would run a virus scan ASAP, then back up, then format, then reinstall everything. I do that once every month or two anyway. 😉
 
Originally posted by: BatmanNate
The machine was fine when I set it up some months ago, and recently two of the other computers on her network have had virus related problems, but if that was the case with this, why wouldn't NAV pick it up? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Backup, format, and reinstall ASAP! I'm 99% certain you have a serious virus that Norton cannot detect. It's far from perfect you know.
 
Originally posted by: SickBeast
Originally posted by: BatmanNate
The machine was fine when I set it up some months ago, and recently two of the other computers on her network have had virus related problems, but if that was the case with this, why wouldn't NAV pick it up? Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Click to expand...
Backup, format, and reinstall ASAP! I'm 99% certain you have a serious virus that Norton cannot detect. It's far from perfect you know.
Click to expand...
Yes, let's nuke the whole thing before trying the easy fix!
:roll:
 
Originally posted by: MDE
Originally posted by: BatmanNate
Originally posted by: Ryoga
Open up a command prompt and run "dir \ /a/s". See what that says is space available/taken.

If you have Norton Systemworks, check the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. That can store huge amounts of stuff that may not show up in Explorer.

Did you convert the drive from FAT32 to NTFS? Run a chkdsk with no /f option. At the end, look at "bytes in each allocation unit". This should be 4096 (it might be 2048 or 8192). If it's 65,536, then that is a big problem since every file is taking up at least 64 K (and can only occupy 64 K size blocks).

Also, I suggest running an online virus scanner like [l]http://housecall.antivirus.com/[/l] I don't expect it to find anything, but it's a good idea to run it due to the local virus activity.
Click to expand...

Did the dir /a /s /p to no avail yesterday, with a variety of other switches to try and pin down hidden files but there were just too many to sort through, although nothing irregular. Drive is NTFS. These symptoms aren't indicitive of cluster size problem, and the drive has been formatted NTFS the entire time anyhow. The system does have a Norton protected recycle bin however, that could be it. It's emptyed, but is there any way it might still be hording things?
Click to expand...
Right click the Recycle Bin, go to properties and purge all Norton protected files.
Click to expand...

That worked, thanks!
 
You can also turn off Norton Protected Files so you don't have to constantly empty it all the time after you've already deleted stuff. Also, you need to do it for each volume.
 
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