My hard drive is missing 14gigs. What happened?

[krackato]

I've using a 120gb harddrive as a slave drive so it doesn't have the OS on it. It shows as 111gb in My Computer. No big deal. Little annoying, but I know about the whole 1000/1024 deal. But now, it says that I've used 107gb and that I've only got 4gb free. That adds up to 111gb, so everything seems fine until I hilite all my folders, right click on properties and it tells me that all the files on the harddrive are only using 93.1gb. Where did the other 14gigs go?

 

[Confide]

First, you might try defrag, and checkdisk, that might find some unallocated space thats hiding, probably also you might try disabling Recycle Bin on that drive, as windows by default allocates a portion of the drive to that, and being that you have a large drive, this portion tends to be quite large probably around 10% of the drive. Try both of these solutions, together they should give you that space your looking for. Post back and tell us what happend, if it didnt work we'lll find a better solution.
As always Good Luck.
Confide.

 

[Muzzy]

From "DT" in newegg's rating of WD800JB:
"For people having problems with your hard drive size not showing up properly, I ran into the same problem. BIOS detected the drive fine, but FDISK only showed the drive as being 10GB. I did a quick search and found out this is a Windows problem(particulary FDisk). Windows 95 and 98(SE also) have a problem recognizing drives over 64GB. This is a known issue and easily fixable. Just go to the Microsoft link I provided and download the 263044USA8.EXE update file there. This will update your version of Windows. Then grab the new FDisk.exe out of the Windows directory and put that on your system disk to use. I had a system disk from Windows 98 and this is what caused the problem. After performing the quick update and putting the new FDisk.exe file on my bootable floppy, FDisk detected the full 80GB. From then on everything went great."

Follow this link http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q263044&ID=KB;EN-US;Q263044

 

[hominid skull]

It's all todo with the way that Hard Disk manufacturers list the size of the disk.

they take a 120GB disk to be 120,000,000,000 bytes big

a proper kilo byte is 1024 bytes, a mega byte is 1024 kilo bytes, a giga byte is 1024 mega bytes.

therefore a 120,000,000,000 (IBM rated hard disk size) in true gigabytes is:

= 120,000,000,000 / (1024/1024/1024) ( to give true giga bytes as described above)

= 120,000,000,000 / 1073741824

= 111.758708953857421875 Gb, real gigabytes.

Hope that clears it up..🙂

should have read your post more duh... 😉

 

[krackato]

You know, I don't really have a clue what happened. I ran Norton Disk Doctor, Norton Speeddisk, and I thought I remembered both of those things not doing anything for my problem. But then I checked 2 seconds ago and my 14gigs are back and I'm only using 93.5 gigs. Very, very peculiar.

 

[KingofFah]

You using XP? System_Volume_Information hidden system folder is probably taking up ur other 14 gigs

 

[krackato]

Using Windows 2000.

 

[Goi]

If you're using Norton Utilities, the space is probably in your Recycle Bin. Here's a magic trick. After using your computer for a long time, open explorer, and note how much free space you have on any of your drives/partitions. Then, right click on Recycle Bin and click "Empty Norton Protected Files". Look at how much free space you have now(might require an F5), tada, you magically gain back 100s of MB or even GBs depending on your drive capacity and usage pattern.

 

[krackato]

That's probably what that was. I do have a Norton Protected Recycle Bin and I think I did clear it out the other day. Just hadn't put 2 and 2 together. Thanks for the tip.