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"Lost" hard disk space

5K views 1 reply 2 participants last post by  racock 
#1 ·
Hi

I have recurring problem, which I have noticed on PCs other than my own. The used space on my hard disk drive is approximately 5GB higher than the total of all the files on it. (It's always been around 5GB, every time I've seen it). The only thing I can do is to reformat the disk, and it will be fine for a few months, and then the same amount will "disappear" again. Disk cleanup, ccleaner, etc don't help, and it's not the recycle bin or temporary files.

It happens on my primary (Windows XP) partition, but not on the secondary partition, and last week it happened on my external hard disk after I deleted a large quantity of data.

I only have 60GB in total (30GB on the primary partition) in my laptop, and 40GB on the eternal drive, so its pretty annoying to lose 10GB. If it makes any difference, my external drive is a 2.5" laptop drive, a Hitachi Travelstar, NTFS formatted. Not sure what brand is in the laptop, but it's FAT32. But I've seen this happen on a friend's desktop too (again only on the primary partition).

Any ideas why this happens and if I can do anything about it that doesn't involve reformatting?

drawde
 
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#2 ·
Tell me if I'm teaching you to suck eggs, but what size blocks do you have on your drives, because without decent sub-block allocation, you'll often lose parts of blocks for files when they're smaller than the block size. Even with sub-block allocation, you'll still lose a bit because of the overheads, but 5GB seems a little steep for that size of disk.

If I compare my size of files, with size on disk, I'm losing ~1-2% of the disk. That's with the default block size of 4K. But it probably depends on the number of small file you have around the place.

After deleting a large number of files, it's probably worth-while running a disk cleaner to make all the blocks contiguous again, and that should give you back most of your space, but if they are really not getting re-allocated as free space, then I'll have to dig more.

Rich.
 
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