disk space missing!!!

OK, first of all: my english isn't as good as it could/should be, so sorry for all errors i'll do!

now let's get started:

1. something about my disk: i have 1 disk, 2 parts; C: & D:
on C: i have windows - so this is the main one;
on D: i have ... many games and programs

so, the problem is: i DELETED 3 files (~800 MB) from disk D: and than i deleted it from RecycleBin too! Before deleting I had 900 MB free space on D: ... so I should have it 1700 MB (1'7 GB) after deleting ... but I DON'T HAVE IT.
That happend like 3 or 4 times in last 2 weeks. But it does not happen everytime! I can delete one file & get that extra free space on disk and next minute when i delete some other file, i don't get any free disk space - WHY?!

I don't have viruses, spywares (i checked it with bullguard, f-secure, microsoft antyspyware, ...), i checked the dist for error - but it didn't find anything

I'm like really confused, 'cos i asked many ppl, but noone could help me

If there's anyone that knows anything 'bout this ... any comment, i would be very very gradeful!!!

Tanx!!

 

Only thoughts are that perhaps the space is just not being reallocated properly. Does a reboot cure it?

Or you have Norton Utilities and are using the Protected Recycle Bin.

 

everything's OK - thanks anyway

 

I've got a similar problem with missing disk space. In my situation, I don't have any Norton utilities installed. The difference from the actual disk capacity and the occupated space is at a ridiculous rate!

13.65GB occupied by all files (hidden or not)
19.53GB of the total hard drive partition (which hosts the Windows XP OS)

The free space reported is 1.52GB!

We are talking about 4.36 Gigabytes of missing space!

My computer is (I believe) sufficiently protected from viruses and spyware (Spybot search and destroy, spyware blaster, spyware doctor, Adaware SE Pro, Zonealarm Security Suite 6, XoftSpy). My last searches produced no results.

I don't have any virtual memory on that partition at all. I remember a few days ago I deleted some stuff from my temporary folder and I had 1.78GB free (I didn't suspect too much back then), while a day later this decreased to 568MB without my writing or installing anything!!! Nobody else is using this computer and I have scanned the hard drive without errors. In my defragment utility I spotted that most of the space is taken by files and folders (up to about 94%). What could be wrong? I suspect hijacking...

 

First off, do you have norton protected recycle bin or similar? These protection programs work by making a copy of anything you delete and retaining it even after you empty the recycle bin. In fact, often they will just move it to their protected location and just put a shortcut in the recycle bin when you delete things. Thus emptying the recycle bin does not recover the space. You must empty the protected file ; or turn off this protection.

Secondly, if these are files you downloaded with a P2P application, often you must delete them from the P2P files list in the program first or they will not be deleted but will just be copied to recycle bin or be made non deleteable.


Third XoftSpy is listed as a rogue application, you should uninstall this one
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm
http://www.spywarewarrior.com/rogue_anti-spyware.htm#xos_note


Finally, let me discuss file size versus space occupied by files.
Each file has a certain amount of data in it, a certain number of bits and Bytes (eight bits per Byte). This is the file size, say 100KB or 4354KB=4.354MB.

Now your hard drive is divided up into cylinders, heads, sectors and clusters. The cluster being the smallest amount of space on the hard drive which has a unique address. There is not an address for each bit stored, rather an address for the cluster where a specific amount of data is stored .
http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prkc_fil_lxty.asp
Now lets assume your have your drive formatted using clusters of 4KB size. Each cluster can only contain data from one file. If a file is larger than one cluster in size it must occupy a whole number multiple of clusters. So a 1KB file has a size on disk of 4KB since it occupies a whole cluster. Likewise, a 98KB file will occupy 100KB or 25 clusters. This adds up, and it is not uncommon to have the total size of files much smaller than the size on disk, since much of the space is wasted. One advantage of XP with NTFS is that very small files are saved with their index entry as part of the master file table (MFT) which is compressed and saved as a single file. The same goes for unused files, windows will combine many of them into a single compressed file similar to a zip file. When they are needed, they will be extracted and actually occupy more space. In this case, often deleting them does not recover much if any space. Additionally, as the fact that small files are saved as part of the master file table implies (and the fact that in NTFS the MFT is saved twice not just once) some space is "lost" to format.

There are other things which can lead to "lost" disk space. Do you use one recycle bin for all drives? OR do you have it set to individual bins for each partition? Swap file (page file/ virtual memory ) settings can also impact the amount of free space you see on a drive. Same with system restore, it can be set to retain part of each partition. So maybe you have 10% for system restore, 10% for recycle bin, 5% for temp files, there goes 25% of your drive space.

 

Hmmm... I was wondering about Xoftspy. I am surprised all my other antispyware did not look for it. The funny part is that I also had Adware, which is also spyware... and Xoftspy was the one to spot it! Oh well, I rarely use it anyway.
Thanks for the info and the websites!

Aaah...clusters! I remember them, as I had my eyes on those little HD "critters" in the past when looking deep into the old times FAT16 (I still remember the insane 64kb cluster size). My cluster difference is responsible for with-holding about 186MB of space. Not too big of a deal in my personal opinion. On the other hand I noticed one minor trouble with the NTFS table, which in the end had nothing to do with the space loss. It was because at some point that partition became too full unexpectedly, when decompressing big files to my external hard drive.

One more look around the problem, I discovered the reason of this "waste ". I have the main Windows administrative account (from which I installed windows - besides the actual default "Administrator" account) and another account (also administrative) from which I work. When I do a cumulative check on the disk space, every application (including Windows) disregards the amounts of data on the profiles that it cannot access. So, everything was giving me a much less disk space, which in the end was used in the "locked" administrative account. My first suspicion about was when I checked the profile sizes from within Windows (My computer / Properties). I then logged into that account and discovered that its size was almost around the missing gigabytes.

I stopped using that account because it was severely hijacked in the past (locked with over 499 keyloggers and spies in there), and I had to manually clean up remainings around the computer (files, registry etc...). It seems that I had completely forgotten how much data was left there and I had no idea that the specific administrative account size was inaccessible from another administrator.

 

In the above sentence, are you refrrring to Adaware SE Pro?
If so, that is NOT spyware. It is legitimate and extremely recommended.
If I misunderstood, I am sorry.

 

It's ok! If you check the above list on the website oshwyn5 provided you will see a lot of supposed anti-spyware that have a name closely to Lavasoft's product.

The one I was refering to was not the legitimate one (the Ad-Aware SE), but one of the false ones (Adware).

 

Thats what alot of the rogue applications do, is try to mimic legitimate ones.
Good eye!