Something's taking up space... What is it?

B

bob17

New Member
I have two partitioned drives on one HDD.

My first is C, my second is D. I use C to run windows, and D to store files on.

I have a problem with D though.. When I select all my files and folders and check the total size, I get ~15 GB worth of files. However, my total space allowed on D is 30 GB. But, when I check the disk properties via My Computer, I get 6.81GB free space on D, and total being somewhere between 29 and 30. I have hidden files enabled, system restore isn't set to save on D.. I can't really think of anything else it could be. I'm not running any other programs that would save data to D such as "Go Back".. This is really bugging me. Thanks in advance for any help.
 
there is a program outhtere called folder hog. It'l tell you the size of your folders, where they are located and so on. Might help. Maybe run a utility to empty all tmp and temp folders.........there are also issues with windows handling unrevored disk space in a poor way....find a free utility to do that too, and do a disk check and a defrag, sometimes they will find that too.
 
Obscure feature of NTFS

There is an obscure feature of NTFS called Alternate Data Streams (ADS) that can account for some missing space. Rather than go into why you need to know what these are, I'm just going to post a few links for you. This is a potentially "very bad" thing used by malware code (and other legit reasons).

http://www.windowsecurity.com/articles/Alternate_Data_Streams.html
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1822

A freeware program called LADS which you can use to discover hidden ADS on your NTFS volumes:

http://www.heysoft.de/nt/ep-lads.htm
 
I've never seen it happen with NTFS, but errors on a FAT32 partition sometimes made Windows misread the free space. Try running chkdsk.
 
my gf has a virus that makes her hard drive screw up and virtually tear itself apart because it continually looks for a file that doesn't exist, so because she doesn't have practically any ram it uses like 15 gb's of hard drive space to function at all (it's a dell, so being crappy is to be expected, right?)
 
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