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I have a drive partitioned so it is seen by Windows as 2 drives: C:\ and D:\

Windows 7 shows D:\ as full up in the graphical summary in 'My Computer' summary of all the drives, e.g. the bar graph indicates full and nearly all of the drive's capacity, 108Gb, is full.

So I go into the D:\ drive to look at the files, I see several folders. I select them all and the right-click menu Properties to count their size, expecting the value to be about the same as what Windows reports in the summary, i.e. nearly 108Gb. But the properties window shows the files are very small, Kbs and Mbs, nowhere near 108Gbs.

One of the folders is a backup, but its size is very small.

I've checked the folder options to show all system files and hidden files too - and counted these in the properties.

Something invisible is holding the space.

What is happening here?

I'm afraid to delete anything if it removes valuable backups.

Have I got huge backups here? Why can't I see them? How do I see them?

Journeyman Geek
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therobyouknow
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9 Answers9

4

Good you ruled out the possibility of hidden or system files not being calculated in the file size sum. Some other things to check:

  • Disk corruption: run a chkdsk -f on the disk. Maybe there is a corruption of the filesystem and the FAT (or the MFT, the NTFS equivalent) thinks disk space is allocated while it isn't.

  • Invalid free space reporting: NTFS stores the free space in its metadata. It's possible it's invalid. A chkdsk -f should fix it too.

  • Insufficient permissions: is your user allowed to see and access all files on the disk?

Snark
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Maybe WinDirStat could help identify a file you missed as well.

Adam Driscoll
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I answered a similar question for Windows Vista. Chances are it is volume shadow copy that is taking up the space, which will not show up when you select all files and folders and look at their properties.

Community
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Joshua
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Is D:\ an NTFS drive? If so, then one or more files could have an Alternate Data Stream which is a way of attaching metadata to a file. They are normally invisible to the filesystem, so you need a tool like an ADS viewer. Usually the metadata is small, but there is nothing stopping a file from having a massive file attached to its ADS. (Malware also likes to hide in the stream.)

Sysinternals offers the (free) utility Streams to can view/delete ADS. Open a command prompt and run streams -s d:\*. It should show you all of the alternate data streams of all of the files on the drive. Then you can use the -d switch to delete any large, unwanted ADS.

Tamara Wijsman
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Synetech
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1

You can use the good old DOS prompt (Command prompt) to find out information about all of the files in your directory, navigate to the directory that you are interested in using Windows Explorer and click the Right Mouse Button and the Right Shift key at the same time.

A context menu will pop up giving the option of "open command window here".

You will now have a DOS prompt in the directory you are interested in, use the following command to list all of the files in the directory and their sizes:

dir /a
Richard Lucas
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Less likely, but it could be a junction link to a folder on another drive. The space used by junction link "folders" shows up in the used drive space report, but not in file properties (which may allow you to actually use more space on the drive than what is "available.") Link Shell Extension can help you examine that:

http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/linkshellextension.html

r_alex_hall
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I would have an answer, if this problem would occur on a Unix system ;-)

On Windows, I suspect, it's related to "File Streams": a single file might have a number of associated streams, which each have their own allocation size and data size; depending on which stream you're opening, you will see different sizes for the same file.

Once again: I'm a Unix guy with only limited Windows knowledge; nevertheless, I hope this helps.

Enjoy!

kdo
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If there are a lot of individual files, then it could be "slack space" as a result of how storage is allocated. When you look at the properties, do you see two sizes indicated? (On XP, they are "Size" and "Size on disk", not sure about on 7).

Another possibility is the "System Volume Information" folder. DON'T FIDDLE WITH IT. It can sometimes get quite large, but finding out is difficult as you can't normally access it. It's used for the system restore functionality.

developmentalinsanity
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The answer is a composite than comes from several people - thank you to those - credited usable answers with +1 point. I don't think it is fair or accurate to award the answer to just one of you. Unfortunately superuser doesn't allow accepting multiple answers. I deliberated over it but thought self-answering but crediting you all with mention and rep points would be the best option. So for the following users I will try your answers in that order:

Joshua, Richard, snark, Adam Driscoll, Synetech inc.

therobyouknow
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