Incorrect hard drive free space displayed

M

moundtown

Member
Windows XP PC. 80GB hard drive contains under 15GB of files (found by selecting all files and folders in Windows Explorer and checking properties) but My Computer shows only 5GB free space.

What happened was that I was repairing a 700MB AVI file with Virtual Dub and somehow the output setting caused the repaired file size to be huge. Before the repair process completed a low disc space warning was displayed and the program could not continue.

I located the huge file and deleted it and emptied the Recycle Bin. Only 5 GB of free space was recovered. I rebooted but nothing changed. Did a system restore and still nothing changed.

How do I get the computer to correctly read the hard drive space?
 
johnb35

johnb35

Administrator
Staff member
There are hidden files and folders that will also take up space that you most likely didn't enable when you selected everything. System restore also takes up space. Look under the system restore tab on system properties to check how much space is allocated to system restore.
 
M

moundtown

Member
Thanks for the replies. The WinDirStat program showed the correct amount of free space but Windows explorer still showed only 5GB. Rebooting didn't help so I completely turned off the computer for a few minutes and when started up again everything was fine. Very odd.
 
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