Hard drive space not updating

[wwfarch]

My C: drive's free space seems to be disappearing. I went from Windows saying I had 900 MB left yesterday down to about 450 MB today. When I highlight everything in C: it tells me that only 4.09 GB is taken up. The partition is actually 9.76 GB so by my calculation Windows should say I have over 5 GB left.

My D: partition has had similar problems for awhile. What seems to happen is that when I delete things from the hard drive the free space doesn't update for some reason. It can sometimes go 2 weeks before the newly freed space will show in my computer. Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this?

I have Windows XP Pro btw

[johnnyis42]

a few possibilities...

assuming you have emtied your recycle bin, the space may be due to reserved MFT space (this is unlikely because the size of your partitions would make the default MFT size reservation small as well) or possibly system restore data.

you can check this by going into computer properties, anb under the system restore tab decreacing the percentage of your hard drive reserved for system restore. by default it should be about 12%, which rounds out to nearly 1GB in your case.

this doesn't account for the other missing 3GB, however. you may try to make sure you have hidden files and folders visable. you can check on this in the folder options menu int he tool bar, under the view tab, make sure you check the box to show hidden files as well as uncheck the hiding of system files. your page file would be one of these, and probably weighs in around 500-700 megs depending on how much system memory you have. also, you may have a hidden folder in the root of C: used for an update temp file of some sort that never got deleted after extracting the download.

check it out and let us know what you find!

[wwfarch]

Actually I have system restore disabled so that's not the case. I do have all hidden files and folders visible. I found one hidden folder on the c: drive that had about 500 megs in it but i still can't account for the rest of the missing space. Thanks for your help, I'll continue hunting around to see if I can find anything else buried somewhere in the c: drive

[johnnyis42]

a suggestion.... you might try installing the freeware version of diskkeeper and run an analyze on your disk, soo if there is a large block of "reserved system space" or somehting along those lines. i know there are other utilities out there that do the same job, but this is the only one i can remember the name of at the moment.