4gb lost!

[qwex]

I have a 30gb Maxtor ATA100 hard drive. Win98 reports it as 28.6gb formatted. I've had about 14gb free, but a few days ago, it abruptly dropped 4gb, and I haven't installed anything. I tried highlighting all the files and folders on C: in Explorer (including hidden files), and right clicking and going to Properties, and it reports only 14gb used, yet it reports 10gb free, a 4gb loss. I can't find any reason for this, and I'm running low on space...

 

[Namuna]

Here's a few things to check...

- What's your pagefile size?
- How high do you have your IE Cache set to?
- How much of your HD space do you have allocated to the Recycle Bin? (This is probably the culprit)

Good luck.

 

[qwex]

currently the Recycle Bin is empty, and I cleared out the temp files. The swap file is set to be managed by Windows, but I don't think it's much larger than 100 megs

 

[blargyblarg]

try running scandisk

 

[Dameon]

yep, scandisk is your friend. Windows probably pooched the FAT table somewhere and needs to fix it

 

[BrunoPuntzJones]

yup, i lost 9 gigs one day for no reason. ran scandisk and voila, there it was.

 

[Namuna]

Doesn't matter if the recycle bin is empty...How much of your HD do you have allocated?

1. Right-Click on Recycle Bin and do Properties
-- You should have a Global Tab and a Tab for your C drive
2. Click your C drive Tab
-- NOW you'll see a setting (in percentage) of how much of your HD is put aside for large files in the Recycle Bin.

I recently installed a pair of 36Gb drives and the system by default wanted to allocate a WHOPPING 10% of each drive to the Bin....As you may have guessed, I lowered that.

 

[qwex]

it was at 10% allocation, but I think it's always been like that. I tried changing it to different settings, no change to the amount of free space. I'll try scandisk, hopefully that'll do it, but it's weird that 4gb was lost so randomly

 

[Rand]

Just run scandisk, that should fix it. Windows often has that problem of misreporting the remaining capacity of the disk after deleting large files.

 

[esung]

also, how big is your cluster size? If you have a lot of small files, it could explain why the total space <> free space + occupied space.

but if it's a sudden drop in usable space, I agree it's time to run the scandisk to see if there's lost clusters that's wasting your HD.

 

[Soccerman]

scandisk. period!