I've been puzzled all day by a problem on my friends PC. His Hard Disk is 34Gb, he's only used 8Gb of it and it says it's full...
I've tried ScanDisk, and everything else I could find to scan and repair drive sectors, nothing has found any error... It is really baffling and we need to sort it out before it drives us up the wall.
Has anyone got an idea of what we could do to repair it? It's in FAT32 if that's any help and he uses XP Home.
I have a guess. Maybe check the Virtual Memory paging file. System Propreties > Advanced > performance > settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory. I don't know if Xp includes the virtual memory paging file in the used space count or not that is why. I don't know, try it I guess.
try defragmenting it, there could be a lot of wasted space that might be recovered...
(i use diskeeper, it sorts this out a bit but im sure the default XP one (which is diskeeper lite) will probably do this for you too)
It has been defragged but as there is only 8% free, not the 15% it asks for, so I'm not sure whether it did a good job. It does show that the hard drive is full of stuff, it's just that there is only 8Gbs worth of files on the HD.
I tried the Virtual Memory settings and it says 675Mb Max but is using 1151Mb... It's still not the 20+Gb of missing space though is it.
how do you know that he's only used 8gb? sounds like he's used 34gb! anyways, run a virus scan. also, maybe try turning off system restore, then turning it back on. run a disk cleanup. search for hidden porn. clear the cache. how much ram does he have?
I know it's 8Gb because a scan of the files on the Hard Drive (which isn't partitioned before you ask) totals only 8Gb of data...
Turning off System Restore fixed it though so thanks.
how do you know that he's only used 8gb? sounds like he's used 34gb! anyways, run a virus scan. also, maybe try turning off system restore, then turning it back on. run a disk cleanup. search for hidden porn. clear the cache. how much ram does he have?
wow, hidden porn can total up to 34GB? 
system restore should be turned off anyways, useless junk that is. Everytime i've had a problem, system restore has an error restoring, which was useful.
^Shame. It's saved my bacon numerous times. Including that little iunes issue with the EQ, even though it didn't totally restore iTunes 6 ( I reinstalled 6 and got the EQ that way, then upgraded it to 7 and copied the doodled EQ over).
But no, it's not perfect. It even froze and killed my computer once.
That would be a good idea for me try as well. I keep having mysteriously vanishing space, and even defragging it after moving half the 20 GB partition's contents over (ok, so the actual space is 18.6 GB and I moved 7 GB over to another drive prior to defrag) didn't do any good.
Slewed, you'd be surprised how much space porn could take up. To make that much space go, it'd have to be freaky spyware, cookies, videos, and things of that nature.
Of course, being a straight girl, porn doesn't turn me on anyway.
Unless, of course, it's guys that are in their birthday suits.
*cough*cough*
Yeah, I think I ahve the same freaky vanishing space problem. Thought maybe it was my fault or a Windows jumbler bug, only fixable by wiping the drive clean and reinstalling Windows, followed by everything else you put in.
And that I'm not gonna do. If I have to do that, I'm installing Linux and skinning it Mac-style, and M$ can kiss my @$$.
I'd do that now, but I have too many Windows apps I actually wanna keep.
another way to clean up space used by restore is to do a disk cleanup. then click on 'more options' and you can then delete all the restore points except the most recent.
And that I'm not gonna do. If I have to do that, I'm installing Linux and skinning it Mac-style, and M$ can kiss my @$$.
Alternatively you could just get a Mac 
^I meant while I scrounge the funds to get one.
If I could, I'd get one now and ditch Winblows anyway. The apps I need are in Mac versions, too.
SAme thing happened to me, i was decripting a 4gig movie onto my D drive whitch has 70gigs of free space, and it said "Destintation (D: ... ) drive full" it was to late in the morning to actuly care so i through it onto my C: whitch oinly had 7gfree. whats that mean?
I found the solution to be to clear all the Scandisk logs out... they build up surprising quickly. That cleared out 18 gb of space for some reason.
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