Windows problem #1 wrong hd size
 

Pain in the ass problem 1. Why on earth won't my hd show the proper size even after I've deleted all the files on it? I just captured a large video onto my drive that took up 60g of an 80g partition. After I deleted the file, there's still space full.

I'm running xp, tried diskcheck, emptied the recycling bin, restarted, what else is there and how can I stop this???

Any help would be appreciated.

If this hard drive is also your main OS drive, there'll be 1-3 GB of swap space on it (it's usually 1.5x your physical RAM), which is hidden by default in windows. And the windows files take about 1.5GB too. It's also possible there's hidden files on the drive, or some weird temp file. You can go into folder options and check the box to show hidden/system files. And a 80GB HD will only show about 74.4GB max in windows anyways, because of the difference between what the HD makers use for GB and what microsoft uses for GB.

The size conversion used by Microsoft or any other OS out there is much different than the on used by HD makers. The size reported by the OS is the true size of the drive. HD manufacturers use the raw bits avalable and do a base 10 shift to determine the GB's of a drive. However this shift that the HD manufacturers use is incorrect due to the fact that 1024 bytes are a kilobyte, 1024 kB is a MB and 1024 MB is 1 GB. So when you acctually traverse from bytes to GB you can see the loss that occurs.

When you buy a drive that says that it is 80G is actually 80000000000 bytes which equates roughly to 74.4 as Elitegibson had previously mentioned.

I wish it was only a few gigs that were off. I'm talking about a 80g drive that shows as having 400mb space free when there's nothing in it! I've checked off the boxes so that hidden files are shown and system files too. same shit.

get a win98 startup disk

boot on it... and fdisk and format that drive... that will prolly fix it...

also are you using fat32 of ntfs? ive always heard that ntfs is a lot better...

Use a nice proggy like TreeSize to display file usage by drive and folder. Something has to be out there - you just haven't found it yet.

am i the only one annoyed by hard drive manufacturers that have begun to advertise drives as 80gigabyte hard drive, yet they are only 74gigs?

how come they cannot be busted for false advertisement? :( it makes me a sad panda.

that is an unformatted size...some drives will give you less space depending on the manufacturer of the drive. also there are alternative filesystems that will give you more space. FAT32 is by far not the most efficient filesystem

There is an explaination provided by Dan on Dan's Data about the differece between the two sizes and how the companies get away with it. It is in the the letter about halfway down the page titled: Megabytes ain't megabytes (the saga continues).

It is 80 billion bytes, as advertised. Filesystem overhead is only going to be a few megs.

The thing is, most operating systems use binary gigabytes (Gibibytes), which are 1,073,741,824 bytes not 1,000,000,000.

shakes head in shame

FORMAT IS THE LAST OPTION

and win 98 does not suport ntsf
never ever recomend formatation as an option, it is the last resport and should never be done lightly. if you dont know what your doing Dont give advice please. sorry to flame you for this but telling some one who is asking the community for advice just to format is just wrong.




now that that is out of the way befor you format, you must realise that on any hard drive you well never get the full size for several reasons,

1. the hard drive makers measure size with kb being 1000 bytes instead od 1024, same with mb and gb a difrence of about 9%

2. next the drive is writen to in clusters, a cluster is a group of bytes, usual like 128 bytes basicly what this means is when you write a file to the hard drive it splits it up into 128 byte chunks. and the last chunk to be writen takes up a portion of the last cluster and the rest of the space is wasted. so if you have a lot of small files you will have lots of wasted space. (this is where ziping is helpful)



now a question for you, how large is the hard drive labeled to be, and how large does it desplay