Missing Memory
 

Greetings All,
I have a 40 Gig harddrive that only has only 15 Gigs left. I have about 8 gigs of music and about 2 in videos and stuff. I have no idea what is taking up the rest of the space. Is there a program or application that can tell me where and what else is on my drive? Thanks and Cheers.

PS I just defraged.

Well, run Scandisk, make sure everything is registering as being there.
Have you emptied your recycle bin lately? Stuff in there still counts towards disk free space.
Also, you should realize that a drive adverised as 40 gigs really only has, what, 37.5 gigs, or something like that.
Other than that, basically you just want to look closely and make sure there isn't some folder off somewhere with 5gb of junk. Frequent offenders here are temporary internet files, windows/temp and 'my shared folder' or wherever a P2P client downloads to.
I assumed you're using Windows, sorry if that isn't the case.

Well, it is not a true 40Gigs. HD manufacturers tell you that it is 40Gigs but they mean 40,000,000,000 bytes. A real gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 bytes so there is about a 7% difference between their definition of 40GB and what you might think you are getting. Windows lists my 40GB drive as being 37.2GB and that it has 40,006,156,288 bytes. Formating and partitioning also takes up a little bit of space so your potential drive size decreases further.

That being said. I don't really know where your space is going. You could have a few bad sectors here and there but I would not think 12 gigabytes worth. Is this the drive you have windows and your programs installed to?

if you have windows xp, it could be backing your drive (for recovery) and it can take some gigs away

what OS are you running?

I'll assume 2K/XP. Check the size of your partition by using Disk Management in Administrative Tools which is in the Control Panel. Then start subtracting thing you know about. Look for another partition other than the one your system is on. Some PC manufacturers setup their own partition for utilities and troubleshooting purposes. Also, check the size of your Program Files directory. Remove any programs you don't need.

Check out how much space is used for "System Restore" if you're in Win XP or ME (control panel - system). Also, are you using a laptop and making files from another computer available offline? They're hidden in \winnt\csc on my windows 2000 machine - check the size of this directory if you have it. Saving internet pages for offline browsing can be another space hog. Lastly, are you sure you don't have any CD or DVD images lying around on your drive :D ?

These last two options(internet pages and CD/DVD images) intrigue me but I have no way of checking to see if that is the case. How do I see if these two things are actually happening? Much appreciated. Thanks

Also look for a page file and hibernation file. Open CMD.EXE and type:

c:
dir /ah

It'll tell you how big they are.

Internet temp files...page file...cluster size...temporary internet files....and other temp folders all take up lots of space


ps. when was memory is hard drive space?

Post removed.

1,073,741,824 bytes is a Gibibyte, 1,000,000,000 bytes is a Gigabyte. Anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.