Drive properties incorrrect

[bwarner]

I just installed Windows XP Professional on my Pentium III computer. My 40 GB hard drive is partitioned into logical drive letters C: D: E: and F:, each approximately 10 GB each. After the install, I went into Explorer and noticed that drive F: properties was indicating almost 6 GB used and less than 4 GB free. I looked at the individual folders (there were just a few)on the drive and they totalled well less than 1 GB. I moved these folders off the drive but still it didn't significantly change the amount of used/free space. I even formatted the drive and recreated it (once as fat32, then as NTFS, but still almost 6 GB used. Something is actually filling up this drive because I tryed copying over data from another drive and "Disk is full" after only about 3 GB of data. Any idea what's going on? Thanks.

 

[fedto]

Try running a surface scan on F.
It's not likely, but I have seen where physical damage was part of the partition but windows has this bad habbit of reporting bad sectors as used space.

 

[capricornholio]

It's not the complete answer, however I'm pretty sure System Restore is allocating some of the space for recovery images. It's definitely not using all the space you are missing, but you can free the space up by turning off System Restore monitoring for that partition.

 

[linney]

Have you got the option to see hidden files and System files turned on? Turn it on via Tools/Folder Options/View.

 

[bwarner]

I ran Norton Disk Doctor on the drive last night. After prompting me, it "corrected" a couple of errors on the drive. But now properties of the drive in Explorer (and Norton) show the total size of the drive to be only 3.5 GB, with 100% free. I did click to allow hidden and system files to be shown, but all that appeared was a recycle folder and a folder labeled something like "System Information". The size of both these directories was just a few MBs.