Missing hard disk space

[brainquake]

I'm betting I'll feel really stupid when someone gives me the answer to this, but here goes: I have an 80GB hard drive, with approx. 74.5 GB usable. I have only one partition, one logical=physical (C drive. Using Explorer and selecting all the folders and files, I get a total of about 54.5 GB, but the disk tools tell me that only 2 GB are free. My gut feeling tells me that the 54.5 GB value is correct. I had been capturing video and estimated that I had plenty of space left over. Where did the rest of the space go? My system is well protected with NAV, ZoneAlarm Pro, and PestPatrol, so I doubt there is some trojan that has taken over and repartitioned my disk, but I'm not ruling that out, either.

 

[IRstuff]

What OS are you running and how many files do you actually have on disk?

Two possibilities:

> Your OS or computer does not support 80 GB devices.

> If you're using standard FAT for the disk format, using a single 80 GB partition could mean that you're losing something like 500KB per file on disk, due to the the limited number of file clusters supported by FAT. If you've got 20,000 files, you've lost 10GB, statistically.

TTFN

 

[brainquake]

I'm running Windows XP (home edition--upgrade) with NTFS, so there shouldn't be any compatibility problems. However, your 10GB/20K files estimate is pretty close, considering that I have 47,577 files in 3,641 directories (including hidden files), and about 20GB is what is missing. Actually, it's rated as an 80GB drive, and it miffs me just a bit that 5GB is not usable in any case.

Here are the specifics:
Sectors/Track 63
Size 74.53 GB (80,023,749,120 bytes)
Total Cylinders 9,729
Total Sectors 156,296,385
Total Tracks 2,480,895
Tracks/Cylinder 255
Partition Disk #0, Partition #0
Partition Size 74.52 GB (80,015,491,584 bytes)
Partition Starting Offset 32,256 bytes

I'm beginning to wonder if something got screwed up with the drive somehow when I tried to use it with Win 98 first edition. I had to wipe everything and do a full restore from backups about a half dozen times before I got the XP upgrade to work.