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I am running Windows XP SP2 with a 30GB Hard Disk.

There appears to be a problem with the amount of hard disk space being detected by windows. When I look at the properties of C: in 'My Computer' it says I have 24GB of used space but when I then open C:, select all files and folders and look at the properties, it says they only have a size of 15GB. Where has my other 9GB gone?! I have it set to view hidden and system files and folders. Is there 9GB worth of stuff still hidden from me somehow, or is there a problem with windows detecting the amount of free space on my hard disk?

I have no idea whether or not this is a recent problem since I only checked as I have been running out of disk space recently. Any help would be much appreciated.

Hi Phall, and welcome to the PCHF.

If you open My Computer, right click on C:, and select Properties this will give you a pie graph of used and free space. It will also tell you the the complete size of your hard drive. Is this informationg correct? It should say Capacity: 25,769,803,776 24 GB

With hard drive manufacturors, they truncate the size, so 30000mega bytes, would be truncated to 30gb, but in the terms of bytes...1 byte = 1024, and the amount of bytes on the computer equals 24gb...it's pretty sucky how they do that, but

Thanks for the tip,

I checked out the capacity and it says my total capacity is 29,983,375,360 bytes which I think is about 28.6 GB. The used space and free space in bytes still add up to the total capacity.

In any case, even when I look at it in bytes, the total used space displayed for C: is 25,859,817,472 bytes and the 'size on disk' when I select all of the files and folders within C: is only 17,034,821,632 bytes so there is still a major discrepancy - somewhere in the region of 8GB whether looked at in GB or in bytes.

Oh yes, i forgot that "size on disk" and "size" vary in differences.

Basically it's a similar explination as before.

Smaller sized files, lets say that have 1 byte of data in them, will use 1024bytes of hard drive space. Pretty stupid, yes, but it's the way it's done.

The smaller the file, the more extra space it will take up, whereas if you have a 200gb file, it will most likely use 201gb of hd space.

If you have a folder full of approx 20 1byte files, that folder will take up 20x 1024 bytes, or 20mb as it were.

Hya Phall1007.

Maybe the system restore is using alot of space? If you go to start/run and type: cleanmgr.exe, then on the "more options" tab select to delete old restore points and press apply. (That will delete all except the latest system restore point)

Or have a look with this app to see exactly what is using how much space and where:

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

This won't report incorrect disk usage joe, it will just take up space.

Thanks for both of your help.

It was the sytem restore in the end taking up most of that space so I got rid of all but the most recent restore point and set the max disk space to be taken up by system restore much lower. However, it was already set at only about 3GB but actually took up over 5GB.