Can't find missing space on hard drive.

[stewick]

I am hoping someone can help with this. We have a 120gb hard disk that we use for storage. It only has client and accounts data on it. There is no applications installed. Acording to both windows and norton disk doctor there is 90gb in use in 7850 files. When going into the hard drive though there is only actually 54gb in use. All data is stored inside of one main directory called data. So the path is d:\data. The total file size of this directory is 54gb and contains 5342 files. We can not find out where these other files are. We have emptied nortan protected files we have set the folder options to show all files but it simply does not add up to us. I hope someone can help with this problem as we only have 20gb left and need to move 24gb over from out main hard drive.

 

[ski]

Windows and NDD may be wrong.
Copy the 24 GB onto it, and see if it holds all of it.

 

[wolluf]

Hidden files?

What does the drive properties pie chart show?

This app

http://www.lpacomputers.telinco.co.uk/ddsetup.zip

should give you a breakdown of what's on the drive.

If 2k/XP was does disk management show (run diskmgmt.msc)
If 9x/ME, what does fdisk show (enquiry mode).

If 2k/XP, run chkdsk, if 9x/ME run scandisk.

 

[stewick]

This is really getting confusing now. Diskmanagment shows that the drive is healthy and that it has 90ish gb of data. When running the diskdata it is really strange.
It says that the drive d has 56,124,675kb. But again on the summery screen it says that 91,145,675kb is in used space. I have no idea whats going on now.

 

[ski]

You may also want to defragment the HD.

 

[pweegar]

How old is this pc? Could be that the BIOS is outdated and needs to be updated. Either the BIOS or the OS is reporting the wrong info. How often do you do a backup????

 

[stewick]

Defrag was the first thing I did.

The Motherboard is only about 6 months old but the hard drive its self is about 18 months old.

Gonna go into dos and see what it says. See if its just a problem with windows.

 

[wolluf]

What's the filestore type - and more importantly the cluster size (Ntfs should default to 4kb, but fat32 will be at least 32kb - perhaps 64, which would create a lot of slack space - like what used to hapen on FAT16 as you approached its 2GB limit). So, if its fat32, suggest you convert it to ntfs - you should get most of the missing 30GB back (convert D: /FS:NTFS from command prompt).

 

[hotfusion]

A fairly obvious point, but occasionally overlooked: Have you run Scandisk yet? There could be a lot of lost clusters there using space, although I would rather go with Wolluf's suggestion of slack space - if the files you are storing are simple text files, running to perhaps a couple of Kb a piece, slack space would become a serious issue on this drive.

Regards, Andy.
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My pathetic attempts at learning HTML can be laughed at here:

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[TekTippy4U]

Compressed volume anyone?

TT4U

Notification:
These are just my thoughts....and should be carefully measured against other opinions.
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