Space on HD disapearing

[Etogo]

Hey everybody!

I have a problem here. I have a 40GB hard drive which is divided in 2. My C: has 20GB and my E: has 20GB (Not exact space but you know what i mean). Then, the other day, I deleted everything off of my E: drive but was left with only 3.5GB.... I formated it and still, it says it's using 19MB and that I only have 3.5GB left. Anybody have an idea what's going on? Could anybody be using this space without me knowing or am I just being paranoid. I'm running Windows 2000 prof. if that helps.

Thanks,
Eric

 

[stevenriz]

Quite possibly there is a hidden virtual memory file on that drive. If you go into your My Computer properties, Advanced, Performance, Change, you will see where the file resides. Secondly you can format that drive, not just delete everything you see. Formatting will definatly get rid of anything you don't know about such as hidden files. Hope this helps.

 

[Etogo]

THanks, but I already had checked that (thought the space might be used as virtual memory). Plus, my view settings are set so that I can see hidden files. I already formated the drive and it still didnt work. Any other ideas?

 

[oldbear]

let's see...wasn't there a problem hardware wise a long time ago when you were limited to the amount of formattable space...probably not applicable here with a modern system and OS. however....how much space is reported for your C: drive? Have you done a properties on it and gotten the actual size?

 

[stevenriz]

I agree with oldbear. Check to see that you formatted the drive using NTFS. If not, you could run into the limitation. When you did the format, what did it say the drive size was? I suggest you go into fdisk and wipe out that partition or at least view the size of it. You should be able to delete that partition and have Win2k recreate it, or recreate it in fdisk and format it within Win2k.

 

[wolluf]

You say you formatted - how? Have you run disk management (run diskmgmt.msc) to see what it thinks are there. You could remove and recreate/format the partition from there.