What's wrong with PM?

In my win 98, pentium II with 2 hard disks drive D has this stats(from mycomputer):

945MB used
2.48 gig free space

But in PM5 and 6(partition magic) it read:

1,565MB used
1,932MB unused

What's happening?

 

bluesky - taking a guess here but they may both be "correct ".

Not sure how either looks at drive space but depending on the size of the drive and the file format you use, your system will work with "blocks" of a certain size and will consider that if any part of a block is used for file storage, the entire block is occupied - even if much of it is really not in use.

So one method could be checking for actual unused space while the other could be checking for available space. Especially if you have lots of small files stored on a disk, the difference can be substantial.

The problem is lots worse with FAT16 than with FAT32 (which uses smaller "blocks "). And can be lots worse with large drives even using FAT32. Luckily for us NT folks, NTFS deals with the issue pretty well.

Try checking again, then running defrag and making yet another check. If the above is the cause, you should see PM reporting more free space after the defrag completes I think.

Good idea to clean out your windows\temp folder first since it can be loaded with small files.