Space allocation error?
I just recently checked to see how much space I have available on my 160GB array in Windows Explorer, to find I only have 28.2 Gigs free. This is odd, because I know for a fact that I don’t have more than 30 Gigs of data being used...
I right click the drive to check its properties to find Windows is reporting 120 Gigs of space in use (with a total of 149 gigs of usable space). Getting a bit worried, I download and install DiskPie 2 and take a look at the charts. DiskPie reports only 30.1 Gigs in use! So what’s the deal with the remaining 100 Gigs of space? :confused2
What's got Windows all wonky? Is it normal for Windows to have difficulty checking for free space on an array?
I right click the drive to check its properties to find Windows is reporting 120 Gigs of space in use (with a total of 149 gigs of usable space). Getting a bit worried, I download and install DiskPie 2 and take a look at the charts. DiskPie reports only 30.1 Gigs in use! So what’s the deal with the remaining 100 Gigs of space? :confused2
What's got Windows all wonky? Is it normal for Windows to have difficulty checking for free space on an array?
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chkdsk /r
And of course I have SP1...
KingFish
Ok, do what was suggested, but other things than misjournaled or unjournaled files can show up that take space. Backups and recovery point files done with Windows will not show up unless you have Explorer in a mode where is shows hidden and system files. I have had one system backup eat 6-7 GB. So, if you are logged in as admin, and have hidden files and system files shown, and you still see no indicators as to what is taking up space, look and see if BIOS has HD mode or size mistated. Crtain modes of HD access can change the useable size of HD, and if BIOS had to recover it might have misID'd drive mode that was best to use and ended up using only part of it if the mode could only be used on a smaller HD. Also, PM here might be nice, see if your run of Chkdsk for whatever reason managed to misset free free space or the BIOS and Windows together, managed to redefine the partition to smaller than drive by a whole bunch.
ADDED: If you run Ghost, Roxio GoBack, Norton Systemworks with the Norton Protected Recycle Bin enabled, you can have hidden files or partitions on drive also, and PM can show some(most) but not all of these right now. The Norton Protected Recycle Bin can be set two ways, to save a files up to a certain part of total HD space, and to empty itself every so often in days. HGhost and Drive Image and Drive Copy put hidden parts on HD, they are by default not active parts, windows will not see them normally, PM can see some of them. you can create this problem with a software mirror to same physical drive also, or an autorun of an imaging backup program. What you have obviously is now a 60-65 GB physical part, suggest you look for unobvious things now also. Ranish Partition Manager can also see hidden, and\or inactive partitions.
John D.
I checked Disk Manager. Just one healthy partition, accept for the fact that it was showing only 17% free.
John: I dont use the protected recycle bin, and I know for a fact how much data is actually on the drive thanks to DiskPie.
Naturally, I was worried that I was eventually going to go to install something and get an "out of disk space" error. I think I even formatted the drive a time or two to see if I could fix the problem.
What eventually happened was that Windows just started reporting free space as a negative number. I'd go to install something and it would say "You have -35250MB free on drive C:. After installing <this program> you will have -35000MB free. Do you want to continue?" (Or some blather to that effect.)
The bottom line was that it never was a problem, other than annoying the hell out of me. I'm not suggesting you should just ignore it, but it may be that something similar is happening to you.
If you have an afternoon to kill, you might try filling up the drive with >28.2GB of stuff just to see what happens when you pass the "zero free space" point. If it just starts counting in negative numbers but works well otherwise, you might want to write it off as another one of those MySteries... :rolleyes2
This is getting worrysome, as O&O Defrag too shows all but the last ~17% of the drive full. DiskPie still shows the correct amount of data usage of roughly 30 gigs used.
Until anyone else comes up with an idea, I might as well try and fill up "all" of the free space available like Prof said.
The hitch is, this is not supposed to count against your free space total. On my system, WinXP reports the drive as 50GB with 49.9GB free. Maybe there is a glitch where Windows is not marking this space as available like it should.
You wouldn't have gobs of Restore Points, would you?
First, the Virtual Memory swap file is about 1.5-2.0 time RAM, and is a hidden system file on HD.
Second, with a mirrored RAID, the size you see is about half total drive space-- because mirror by nature copies it twice, once to each physical side of mirror (if total two HDs are used, then you have the size of one puls othr for mirror). With a soft mirror, windows guesses based on average use, and RAID BIOS can guess based on growth of mirror plus data you use and yeild what remains. Now, to stripe you have some system overhead to track beginning and end of stripe, and to point to stripe next in chain of stripes.
So, if you use a program that is not RAID aware to defrag or to check parts, it is checking ACTUAL parts on physical HDs. In fact, RAID of hardware kind can hide the mirror. Older programs that floppy boot actually have limits as to what they can see as max HD size.
Lets say you have a big recycle bin-- this is a file that can get mirrored, and until it is emptied, you can have TWO of them, one on a mirror. Lets say you have Norton System Works. It can be set up to have a Protected Recycle Bin folder per mech, and it is not too RAID aware. It can be set to use 15% of each physical mech. It can also be set to not Protect all HDs, or to use only one folder on one HD for this. That is a good idea with RAID. BUT, when you move things into this folder by emptying the normal Recycle Bin folder, you then have 2 copies of that one folder with a mirror, and with a mirror plus stripe you can use up not twice, but 2.25X to 2.3X the space you think the Protected Recycle bin is actually using. Also, if you surf a lot, and have a mirrored RAID, guess what, every temp file can get duplicated. when you delete on what you see as usable, then you can get twice as much or more back in free space.
If you have a HD that is not defragged, and is set up for large blocks, you can waste 1\4 of HD with files smaller than block size if you have lots of small files. You can get speed, but at loss of data capacity. Lets say you have small blocks set, you can get slower, but save more space on HD as less is wasted. I am talking about Minimum Block Size, set at HD format time.
When you defrag, note that Widnwos does TWO things if you use Widnwos defrag. It compresses files that have not been used for a while. It also will use the minimum number of blocks possible to store files by rearranging them if it can calc that a rearrangement is possible to have the files all in one chunk.
The compression Microsoft uses is of basicly ZIP type, and ZIP type is not too great with some graphics files, in fact it can make archives that are close to original size of those files it is not tuned for with some vector graphics files. All archivers use the idea that duplicates of entries that fall next to each other can be eliminated and the first instance plus a number to show how many can be substituted. Vector graphics file use edge and fill specs, they do not store each dot. So Zip is not efficient in those cases.
The negative numbers that are allowed are either older files being dumped by something that is not raid aware, or something that the RAID is more efficient than Widnows allows for, as it uses running averages to guess how much you can use. Same thing happened to me on non-RAID where I ran compressed drives, back in DOS days, a running average of compression effectiveness was used, and running defrag more often kept the numbers more stable if I defragged both the container and the "virtual" HD. be careful how far you go negative into numbers, as far as the number versus real capacity of HD.
This is a reply to the whole thread, but that set of ideas is the essence of why your numbers float. I would not expect to see more than 80% effective use of actual physical size of HD in best of case, as bigger blocks waste space and littler blocks are slower, so it depends on how you tune to allow for capacity versus speed. Pick a middle ground, things will get better as far as actual capacity shown goes, on average.
Also, as you get more and more little files, you get bigger and bigger journals to track them. And the journals do take physical space on HD.
John D.
The only other thing I can come up with is that your drive has bad sectors and Windows is marking them as not available. That doesn't make a lot of sense, since with that many bum spots the thing would be rattling like an old Yugo.
Could there be some corruption in the file system itself?
If that won't do it, I'll re-image the drive from my backup which was made a week or two ago... But I'll leave that as my last resort.
Thanks for the help guys!