Missing Hard Drive Space

[Vae]

Slightly unusual problem. I'm looking at a 20Gb HDD that WinXP is reporting as being 17Gb full but the total of the directories through My Computer is only showing up at 4.6Gb of files. Yes I have made sure it can see Hidden and System files.

I also ran a chkdsk and dir/s to check the amount of files taken which agreed that 17Gb of files were present. It seems to me that there must be a directory/directories that are not being detected through My Computer.

Anyone got any suggestions about how to find out what the directory is without searching via Msdos and dir commands and then how to solve the problem?

 

[TdC]

hmm. defrag? how about moving the data off the drive and fdisking+formatting it? btw, what does fdisk say about the drive anyway?

 

[Clown]

There's shit that you've deleted that won't be picked up in My Computer. I used to free up a lot of space with Norton's "permanently delete files" thingy.

 

[xane]

Have you got other users on the PC ? Check their accounts and in particular the Temp and IE Cache folders, they sometimes don't show up on scan made by other users.

 

[xane]

Found a useful article for you

How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes in Windows XP