Comments on: Hard Drive space

By: tomliotta

tomliotta — Sat, 01 May 2010 03:15:04 +0000

I then have 451 GB of the disc used, of which only 391GB is accounted for by the sum of the loaded files and folders. i.e. there is still over 60GB which cannot be accounted for – just as there was before.

But that is off by a full order of magnitude from your original question:

My hard drive (Vista, 450GB) occupancy is 99.8GB and yet the sum of the individual folders is only 33GB.

If those are both accurate, then it most definitely is not …just as there was before.

If it truly is “391GB”, then I wouldn’t even think twice about the discrepancy. It can easily be accounted for by poor conversions from KB to MB to GB or by differences between ‘sizes’ and ‘sizes on disk’ among other things.

A clear statement of what you are seeing, where you are seeing it and how you come up with values for “the sum of the individual folders” is needed before any good answer is possible.

Tom

By: johnbl

johnbl — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 15:49:08 +0000

The disc is NTFS formatted and was thoroughly cleaned with a data destroyer before reloading all my s/w. I have now temporarily loaded the disc with extra folders to prove that the rest of the disc is accessible. I then have 451 GB of the disc used, of which only 391GB is accounted for by the sum of the loaded files and folders. i.e. there is still over 60GB which cannot be accounted for – just as there was before.
Another strange fact is that, at the early stages of restoring my all my files after reformatting, there was initially no ‘lost’ space due to unidentified files. Unfortunately, I didn’t notice at what point they appeared.

By: chippy088

chippy088 — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 10:18:28 +0000

The BIOS sees the drive as a whole, but it does not tell you how the physical drive is partitioned, so you can not use that as a basis of usable disk space. Only that the disk is working and it is recognised.

I agree that it might be a partitioning problem, as you can not see the whole 450GB. This is the bit that will restrict the way the OS lays down the data.

Is it formatted as ntfs?

You are using a 32 bit OS, can it access every memory address on the disk?
What is the highest address the OS can reach? These are things influenced by the formatting method.

(Highest number (decimal) 32 bit addressing can hold is 8,589,934,591. 1 gigabyte = 8 589 934 592 bits.)

Definately get onto the manufacturers tech support team. It will save a lot of aggravation trying to do it alone.

Never had this problem before, so it is an interesting subject. If you sort it could you post the result please. I’m certainly interested in the fault cause etc.

By: johnbl

johnbl — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 16:51:05 +0000

When I backup on an external hard disc the file created (although .compressed’) is also larger than the sum of the files that are stored. This suggests to me some other cause than just a faulty hard drive – but I am open to suggestions.
P.S. It is out of warranty!

By: technochic

technochic — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 15:38:18 +0000

Sounds like a bad drive to me, I would get on the phone with tech support for the manufaturer if it is still under warranty.

By: johnbl

johnbl — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 10:16:23 +0000

I don’t think the space is not being ‘seen’. The full space on the hard disc, as well as two other attached discs, is being displayed. Also, the amount of unattributable space that is used seems to vary: the more I load large files in and out it appears to shrink. I have, of course, emptied the recycle bin! The HP system does indeed create a sub partition on the hard disc, but Icleared that some time ago and reformatted the entire disc.