Where is the missing memory on my hard drive?

wazza

I have a 80Gb hard drive which is partitioned. When i add up the memory of the drives it adds up to 65Gb. What has happened to the missing 15Gb? I know a small amount is used for the hard drive info.

MadTechie

What OS are you using..
I assume windows XP or vista/7
First off you won't get a full 80Gb but 15Gb seems a lot to loss,
(maybe under the sofa)

First off it maybe used as if you have a 1byte file and your drive is formatted in 4byte clusters then that 1byte will in fact take 4bytes (but losing 15gb is unlikely, and if you have you reallllllly need to defrag the drive)

So assuming that's not the case

bring up Disk Manager
To do that, Right click on "Computer" or "My Computer" and select Manage. (That's Computer Management)
Now, on the left find Storage and click the + if theirs one there and you should see "Disk Manager" click that now on the right side your see the Volume and Drive set-up..
the top half is the Volumes (drive letters)
the bottom is the disk itself now see Disk 0, it should say something like
Disk 0
Basic
80Gb
Online

check what it says, the to the right of that your see the the partitions
you should see something like "System (C: ) 50Gb NTFS"
can you give us that data (also anything else on that drive) for example you may also see "System Reserved 100Mb NTFS"

Sorry!
Its 2am.. so that probably isn't the clearest post in the worlds!

banger9365

if you open my computer and then right click on the hdd then properties ,
look at the Capacity in bytes it should look like this 80,000,000,000 bytes depending on who makes the drive it might be bigger or smaller
then next to it you will see a GB figure ,
now a 80GB hdd should show up has 74.5GB if it show a Capacity of 80,000,000,000 bytes,
so with knowing the Capacity off the drive it might not be 15GB missing ,

wazza

Thanks for the speedy replies. I will have a look tomorrow and report back

John_Gray

Download and run (in Administrator mode, if you can) TreeSize Free, and it will tell you which directories use what disk space.

robmar0se

With a 80gb hdd I suspect you are using XP. You may have some hidden partitions? If you goto the control panel, then click on admin tools, then computer management, then disk management, then you should see a graphic of how the drive is partitioned eg recovery partition etc.

You can also loose "space" if you have bad sectors, do a chkdsk c: /r from the command prompt, at the end it will give you the details of how the disk is allocated.

Kernel_Sanders

banger9365 wrote: »

if you open my computer and then right click on the hdd then properties ,

You cannot do this in XP. My computer only shows each drive, so if there are any hidden partitions you won't know about them.

ChiefGrasscutter

for example:
My (old) Dell has two hidden partitions
One is a diagnostics partition
The other is the 'system restore to factory condition' partition.

Both of these contain programs & data relating to their function and subtract form the overall disc space available to the user, though in my case the amount 'lost' is only some 3GB

MadTechie

Kernel_Sanders wrote: »

You cannot do this in XP. My computer only shows each drive, so if there are any hidden partitions you won't know about them.

True, hence why I started the suggestion of using Disk Manager,
This will show the drive size and other partitions (while it could still show the drive as having less capacity than it actually does, this could point to partition errors or maybe a bad set-up the BIOS but that another can of worms!)

of course using programs like TreeSize, will help in most cases,
it wouldn't help if the partition is only using 95% of the drive.
so that's why I started there.

wazza

Got around to looking into my harddrive. It is a 80Gb. As expected there is a recovery partition. The rest of the drive i had it partitioned when the harddrive was in the old laptop. Following MadTechie's advice all three partition are healthy and when i add the memory it adds up to 76Gb.

I am using a laptop with windows 7 to look at the old harddrive. When i first posted my query i was using a laptop with vista.

Now my plan is to make copy of the important data from my old harddrive and then wipe it clean.

Any suggestions? Want to remove all partitions.

Thanks for all the replies.

smos585

wazza wrote: »

.

Now my plan is to make copy of the important data from my old harddrive and then wipe it clean.

Any suggestions? Want to remove all partitions.

Thanks for all the replies.

Just go into the control panel's disk management and delete the partitions, and then just create one new NTFS partition with a quick format. I would then download and run clean disk security* (there are others), which can then securely overwrite the drive as many trimes as you need, thus making the old indo irrecoverable.

* There is a free and paidfor version of CDS - http://download.cnet.com/Clean-Disk-Security/3000-2094_4-10052111.html