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February 17th, 2007 13:00
Hard drive capacity decreasing rapidly
I ordered my Dimension 9200 with a 500GB capacity, as I logged in i was welcome to only 455GB of capacity. I don't know why this is but it probably is related to my problem..
I transferred some data from my old PC to this new one, aswell as downloading some programs. I checked my hard drive capacity after this and it went down to 406GB. I browsed my C:\ drive and the contents of it, it totalled to around 28GB..so I wondered why it read that I had 406GB left?
Logically it means it actually has 49GB of data on it then right?
I then defragmented my hard drive to see how fast it would complete that process. During this process, I looked again at the C:\ drive and it said the capacity now was down to 397GB!
I was not installing or adding anything to my computer, it was only running the Defragmentation. Granted, I don't know too much about computers but I have never seen anything like this.
Yesterday, I installed Flash 8 and it said it would take around 700-800MB of space. I checked my hard drive and it lost 2GB to that program being installed!
What's going on?
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ejn63
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87.5K Posts
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February 17th, 2007 13:00
PETER345
5.8K Posts
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February 17th, 2007 16:00
HDs are sold with a measure of GB = 10^9 whereas Windows uses GB=2^30. The ratio is 1.073. This means that 500 GB in the store is only 500/1.073=466GB to Windows.
OK, Dell usually has a system restore partition of about 4G and there must have been 7G or so of stuff on your HD (Windows, programs, etc) when you got it. That leaves 455G of space in Windows.
Normally the Windows system restore is limited to the amount of space it will use and defragmentation should not change the disk space. Hence, there appears to be something strange going on (as you already noted).
I would try some controlled experiments. For example, copy a 2G file and measure the space before and after. Delete (not put in the recycle bin) the file and look again. The space should come back.
Try turning off system restore to see if that is the problem (of course, you will lose the ability to go back and you can turn it back on again later).
Did your machine come with any sort of automatic data backup? Normally that goes to another partition, so it would exhibit the symptoms you are seeing.
Peter
shino87
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February 19th, 2007 11:00