Win NT 4.0 SRV -- missing space 1

[richardv]

C: has 4 GB allotted to it.
Currenly showing 3.7 GB used when right-clicking the c: icon.
When checking the contents of the root of c:, did a Ctrl+A and checked properties to find about 1.08 GB in use [all folders and subdirectories plus files in the root of c:].
I made sure that "show all files" was selected.

It is an Win NT 4.0 PDC w/ SP6a having c: in FAT.

Any ideas would be great.

 

[JimInKS]

Your first method (right clicking on C icon) will show actual used and free space. The second method will calculate the total of all files in the selection (I think) and not account for cluster overhead (the space wasted in a disk cluster when file size is not a nice multiple of cluster size).

Your post seems to indicate C: is formated as a FAT partition. If it is FAT and 4G then the cluster size is 64K. This is the smallest disk allocation unit on disk and will be very wasteful of disk space.

The smaller your files tend to be the more wasteful it is. If you have a 20K document it still requires 1 cluster on disk, wasting 44K of space. This is about 67% wasted space.

It's hard to believe you have this much wasted space, but if you have a lot of really small files it is possible. I know there are utilities which will display the cluster overhead, but I can't remember one at the moment.