hard drive full?? but it's not...

[Jittles]

I am trying to stretch the life of my 6GB hardrive till I get my new 60GB later this month.

I am trying to unzip a large file but it says C: is full. I checked in My Computer and it says 950MB free.
Why does it say it's full then??

 

[Adul]

how big is the file? If I remember correctly, you need twice the space free to unzip a file has it creates a temp. copy of it first.

 

[HansXP]

Indeed, unzipping files can take quite a bit of temp space.

 

[RaWrulez]

okay i have 1.9gb left on my d Drive... a sepret 20gig WD... but when i try to move a 250 meg file it says the drive is full.... NO i have 10X as much space so whats my problem... i also turned of recycle bin thinking it was holding space for it....

 

[VBboy]

Bottom line:

You may have logical errors on your disk. These are not physical defects, so don't get scared yet. You probably have a lot of lost clusters which are space that is not directly addressible by the OS, but it doesn't know it. This usually happens when you restart or shut down your computer while a program is writing something to disk (or the program simply crashes). In that case, the space becomes physically used, but the file may look like it's only a few KB in size. Try saving a Word document but restart your PC in the middle of the process. That will result in a few KB of lost clusters.

Scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor will find those problems and fix them, reclaiming such lost disk space.

Of course things could be worse if you actually have bad sectors on your disk. For example, you could have 1 GB (which would be terrible) in bad sectors. In this case, the File Allocation Table (and therefore the OS) know about that unusable space and the free disk space will be computer accordingly. So if your HD is 10 GB and you have 10% of it in bad sectors, you really have 9 GB of usable space, and it's time to take the hard drive out and drive a few nails through it (note that it voids your warranty).

 

[VBboy]

You should check for disk errors using the Scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor tools I mentioned above, but I wouldn't bother doing it every time Windows is not correctly shut down. When Scandisk automatically runs after you boot up your PC, you can cancel it unless you know something that was writing to disk crashed - then you will want to reclaim the lost space (in lost clusters) by letting Scandisk analyze the file system and marking that space as actually used. Delete files like FILE000.CHK that are created when Scandisk recovers that space.

 

[VBboy]

And while we're on the subject.. I hate WinZip because if you have 2 drives, it first extracts the files to Windows\Temp directory, then moves files to where you actually wanted them extracted. I use WinRar (by RarSoft) which is a little slower, but gives you more options and supports Rar compression (which is more powerful than Zip compression).

 

[Adul]

Winrar rocks. I ditched winzip when i realized winrar does it better.

 

[VBboy]

Adul, I think you will enjoy WinAce even more. It is the most beautiful (err, most user-friendly) [de]compression utility you will find. It supports both Rar and Zip, it's faster than WinRar, and gives you options that WinZip can't even dream about.

It supports Ace compression which I believe is somehow related to Rar compression, but allows dictionary sizes up to 4 MB (vs. 1 MB of WinRar) - which sometimes results in better compression.. sometimes.

Try it 🙂

 

[bozo1]

Winace rulz!

 

[BillMartin12]

I've had a problem like that before. What I did was find a different unzipping program and believe it or not, it solved the problem.

I've had a similar problem with an Mp3 decoder. Said I didn't have enough space to decode a file to a WAV, but I still had you know... 26 GIG of space left on the damn drive.

Just found a different program and everything was perfectly fine!


Best of luck
Bill martin

How To Build Your Own Home PC for under $700, Even If You're a Techno-Dummy!

 

[billyjak]

Get a program called Zip Majic 4.0 from Ontrack
Youu can execute programs and use them without unzipping them.
It will also zip any file on your drive and run it like it's not zipped.
Awesome company.
Also check out power desk 4.0, a utility like explorer with everything they left out.
Check it out Read here

 

[TunaBoo]

I can run zipped files like it is not zipped in winzip... as long as it is only 1 file big (like 1 exe)

But ya winrar and ace are nice.

 

[Shalmanese]

the free space section of your FAT is probably corrupted which means that windows thinks you have space which you dont. click on your drive an go properties and see how much is being used and then go into the drive and select all and go properties to see if there is any difference. if there is, a quick scandisk will fix it.