Incorrect amount of free space reported.

Windows 2000 is ******** up my hard drives. I have 2 drives in 5 partitions, and they all report the wrong amount of free space. It's not the drives, because the recovery console and Win98 are reporting the correct amount It's Win2K.

The free space starts off as normal, but when files are removed the amount did not change instantly, but it takes it's time - the free space increases slowly. The space usage is checked by selecting all files and folders and viewing properties. It did not happen to all the drives at once, but only when they reached a certain low point in the amount of free space. Indexing Service is disabled. What's happening?

Please help me,
Samir Talwar

 

Other than annoyance, is it causing any serious problems?

What file system?

How low on free space are your drives?

 

It's really just an annoyance, but it does become a problem when I need to install something and find I have 11Mb of free space when it should be saying 300Mb or so.

My G: drive is quite low on free space (see above), but not that low! It has happened on all of my drives - 2 NTFS and 3 FAT32, but is not a problem in DOS, Win98 or the Recovery Console. My other drives are suffering from the same problem as well.

Any help please?
Samir Talwar

 

At the risk of telling you things you already know, I have to wonder if 98 and the recovery console numbers you see reflect actual free space while 2K is giving you usable free space.

For the info of any reading this who aren't familiar with how this happens, it's a matter of how the file systems store data. They all use a block of a certain size as their unit of storage. If any part of a block is filled, the entire block is considered used (well, not exactly but close enough).

With large files this makes almost no difference but with lots of small files it certainly can.

For instance, if your drive's file system is using 4Kb blocks and you have a 1Kb text file, the actual space used will be 1Kb but the "available" space used will be the entire 4Kb block. Depending on the tool you use to measure "free space" it could report either way.

So potentially 100 files of 1Kb each (and reported as such) could really be using up 400Kb of your drive.

Fat32, depending on the size of the partitions, can be even worse with 8Kb or larger blocks so the same 100 files of 1Kb could tie up 800Kb of drive.

 

Here is what the folder properties say:

15,847 Files, 728 Folders

Type: Multiple Types
Location: All in G:\

Size: 23.9 GB (25,692,857,490 bytes)
Size on disk: 23.9 GB (25,767,813,120 bytes)

According to this, if "Size on disk" means "including wasted space," then that isn't the problem. However, if it doesn't, then I think you've found a solution!

Samir Talwar

 

How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes deals with this issue on Win2000. There are seperate but similar articles for XP and 2003.

You didn't say what file system you run but there should be some good information for you in the article.

 

It's a FAT32 partition. I'm missing 300Mb I should have: help me?

Samir Talwar