OT: Tech help (drive space)

[pudley4]

My laptop has a 60GB hard drive. It's all one partition, and it's really 56GB. When I right-click and view properties, it shows 36.5GB used and 19.5GB available. However, when I view all the folder sizes and add up the totals, I get a total used space of around 20GB. So somehow over 16GB are unavailable, but there's no info on what is using this space.

I'm running XP Home w/SP2.
I'm logged in with the "admin" account, so I have access to all files and folders.
The System Volume Information folder (for system restore points) is ~4GB and is included in my 20GB total used space.
I've used Partition Magic to verify there are no other partitions.
I've made sure all hidden files and folders are shown.
I've used a couple of different programs (Advanced File Manager, ShowSize, and FolderSizes) to get the actual sizes of the files and folders, and they all show roughly the same numbers.
I'm using NTFS and the cluster sizes are only 4K, so this shouldn't be attributable to "slack".

One other thing - when I defrag, it shows me two very large sections of "contiguous files". I would estimate these two sections added together are somewhere around 30% of my total drive space. These are not spaces left available for the swap file.

Any ideas?

thanks in advance.

[bort411]

How big is your pagefile? How do you know that one of those large contiguous sections is not your pagefile?

[pudley4]

Pagefile is 768MB.

They're not the pagefile because:
1-In defrag, the pagefile shows up as an "unmovable file", in a different color, and at the beginning of the drive.
2-In the file/folder size programs I used, the pagefile shows up and is counted in my total.

[AncientPC]

You probably have system files hidden by default, and they can possibly account for a few gig.

[pudley4]

[ QUOTE ]
You probably have system files hidden by default, and they can possibly account for a few gig.

[/ QUOTE ]

[ QUOTE ]
I've made sure all hidden files and folders are shown.

[/ QUOTE ]

[AncientPC]

A is different from B, people confuse the two.

[Terry]

This may or may not be relevant to your problem.

My tinfoil hat is firmly in place and I have a theory. You heard it here first.

I did a reformat and reinstall of Windows XP last week. I had been having problems with programs not shutting down, having to end their processes with Task Manager. One day my pagefile usage inexplicably ran amok. When I started poking around, I discovered that 5GB of my drive was “missing” – not hidden, for sure – just unaccounted for.

After the format and fresh install I still had problems with programs crashing or not closing cleanly, particularly Firefox. I was experimenting with the PlayerView testing version and thought that was causing the problems, but I don’t think so anymore.

Yesterday I took a day off from poker and spent several hours browsing tech forums. It seems lots of people are having problems the past week or two; lots of Firefox problems, lots of total system failures, BSOD, pagefile problems, processes continuing to run after being shut down, Firefox not starting even though the process shows it as running, etc.

Now, I was seeing these things in all sorts of unrelated forums, graphics card forums, hard drive forums, Windows tweak fourms, Firefox forums, motherboard specific forums, on and on. The one common thread seemed to be a couple of recently released Windows XP updates.

So here’s my theory. I think what we are seeing is the beginning of Microsoft’s attempt to shut down Firefox. It looks to me like they may be releasing “updates” that intentionally interfere with Firefox ... a repeat of the days when they were releasing “upgrade” X.xx versions of DOS which seemed to have no purpose other than to insure that programs like PCTools and some other system utilities would not run.

It doesn’t seem to matter whether or a person is actually using Firefox, the recent XP updates seem to be the problem, and my theory is pure speculation ... but is my best guess at what is causing the recent rash of computer problems.

Ah well, I’m done now.

[pudley4]

Yes, I'm aware of the differences between the two. They are both enabled (so I see the files and folders in Windows Explorer). Plus, even when they are hidden in WE, these files show up in the other programs I'm using to view files/folders.

[Kablooie]

I can't in any case think of any system file that would be even close to that large. In fact this is positively weird, and the only things i can think of that could cause this are, in no particular order:
[*]Your computer has been cracked, and somebody has hijacked part of your file system as an invisible ftp server or like. Possible - there are utilities that do this - but not probable imho.
[*] Windows has managed to screw up its file pointers and has effectively lost a large portion of your disk.
[*] Some kind of hardware error has occurred with your harddrive, and the os has walled off part of it as unusable - except that this is much too large an area for that to have occurred, and for your drive to still be functional. Also the drive would be reporting errors, which at least some of the tools you've used should have detected.

As with any kind of disk strangeness, i would back up anything you care about immediately. Then if you want to try and fix this, i suspect your only real option is to reformat the drive, and reinstall windows. If you find after reformatting that the drive has suddenly shrunk, then i would assume hardware problems, and replace the drive.

[Pinga]

norton recycle bin?