Drive Size Used Versus Show?

[Luthien]

Why is it that if you highlight your boot drive under mycomputer the space used is so much larger than the when you highlight all files on your boot drive and do a properties file size check? Of course you must have system protected files checked off in explorer but even then the difference is pretty large.

In my case the difference is about 10 gigs. I did the same thing on other hard drives and this issue doesnt exist. I checked several other PC's I have and noticed the same thing, that only the boot drive has a difference in reported size.

Anyhow I searched the web but cant find the answer.

Thank you if you can shed some light on this.

 

[wanderer27]

I believe the OS reserves some space for itself (NTFS, file system, etc.), but 10G sounds like a lot.
The initial OS install seems to almost make it's on partition on the boot drive (I've seen this from doing clean installs), but I don't remember how big it is right off hand.

Don't know how much this helps (if any), but it's a start.

 

[Bob Anderson]

Originally posted by: Luthien
Why is it that if you highlight your boot drive under mycomputer the space used is so much larger than the when you highlight all files on your boot drive and do a properties file size check? Of course you must have system protected files checked off in explorer but even then the difference is pretty large.

In my case the difference is about 10 gigs. I did the same thing on other hard drives and this issue doesnt exist. I checked several other PC's I have and noticed the same thing, that only the boot drive has a difference in reported size.

Anyhow I searched the web but cant find the answer.

Thank you if you can shed some light on this.

If you are using the NTFS file system on your bootable drive, windows does not individually list certain types of files, namely alternate data streams (ADS), which are meta data files attached to other files. They cannot be seen in explorer, even with show system files checked. That would account for some of the gap.

If you want to see these 'super hidden' ADS files, use ADS Spy:

http://www.merijn.org/programs.php#adsspy

It is harmless, but don't delete any ADS files it reports.

-Bob

I forgot to mention the REGISTRY!!

Windows does not report the size of the reg in explorer.

 

[Rilex]

You cannot calculate the size of folders you do not have access to. In otherwords, System Volume Information and its subfolders is where System Restore is kept which could take up multiple gigabytes.

The registry would be reported by Explorer since the hives themselves take up the same amount of space (if not a little bit more due to the file system) that the OS reports via system properties.