Is my computer misreading the size of my C Drive?

Question

I have a Lenovo T400 laptop running Windows XP. My C Drive has a capacity of 139 GB, and my computer claims 136 GB of it is being used. However, if I select every file and folder (including hidden ones) in the C Drive and select Properties for the items, it manually calculates that the entire C Drive contains only 91.8 GB. Where is this 'phantom' 44.2 GB going? I don't have that much on my computer, but the problem is, my computer thinks it is nearly full, and will restrict saving and installing of files that it thinks will put it over the limit, however I am fairly certain it is nowhere near its full capacity. I have run Check Disk, and it has not determined that it is miscalculating the hard drive space. Although I believe computers often set aside a certain amount of hard drive space for running basic operations, there seems no conceivable reason that it would be setting aside over 44 GB. Additionally, I have run Diskeeper and defragmented the C Drive, at which point I noticed very large chunks of files appearing as defragged, although so instantaneously I found it hard to believe it was actually scanning this massive amount of hard drive space so quickly. Does anyone know where this missing 44 GB could have gone or how I could fix this problem? Even a referral to a product that can search for and correct this error would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

yes, it could be hidden and system files. run a drive clean up and see what happens. Unlikely though, with my 4TB of storage at most I've ever experienced is 20GB of crap. You only have around 140GB hard drive, short of using it for 50 years won't generate that much junk.



Check your recycling bin, that is not normally counted as spaced used on the hard drive. Stuff gets moved there but its still on the drive. you may of forgotten to empty the bin.



Some companies choose to partition part of the C drive as a recovery partition, does your computer have that? That can be anything from 5Gb to 20GB in size.



Finally, depending on how much RAM you have, at least double of that is reserved on the hard drive as the page file. this is a portion of the hard drive to be used as RAM. If you have 1GB ram, you'll have a 2GB pagefile. its another hidden system file, can't be deleted while windows is running, and will appear to be a very large file all the time no matter how much of page file is actually being used.

Answer 2

There are multiple ways to explain that:



When you select all files and check the size, you won't get the secret files, the cache, the temps and hidden system folders. So it's possible you have 44Gb in crap laying around useless. Use drive clean-up utility to remove most of the leftovers from previous installations.



Also know that most laptops comes with a partition which seems empty, but it's not: it contains the essential files to re-install windows...you can confirm by looking at the CD/DVD that came with your laptop, it should not be a true windows CD but merely an install or recover disk.

Answer 3

this may happen if the logical drives were set wisely at the same time as the device were first preped, the way its written doesnt enable a lot alternation, your basically right and saftest way is to backup whats on the D: and then delete the logical force then the logical partition, resize the C: force to inspite of length you want, and then recretae the logical D: lower back with inspite of area are left with.