Ok. Weeks ago, I had a virus which disabled my ability to type
You can see how that is a great problem as I cannot type format C: or get into BIOS because hitting Delete is useless.
Luckily, I took out the drive, put it into a friend’s old computer and installed Windows XP on it in the c:/windows directory, writing over the old install and getting a new uncorrupt registry. However, that meant I still had my files and such.
However, I noticed a big problem as I deleting stuff from my 60gb (main) and 40gb (media) hdds.
If you look at the picture below, when I highlight all the items in C:/ it only shows up at 19.2gb (which I can definitely account for and is ok). However, when I right click on C:/ (bottom half of pic), it says that I have used up 32.9gb of space and have only 22.9gb left free… meaning somehow, though windows is reading the 55.8gb (yeah, 60gb is that much heh) it is somehow missing approximately 13gb of it… and that is a fairly large chunk I’d like to have back. I looked at the drive in Partition Magic and it showed up fine and also said that 33gb is used though i dunno where that 13gb came from. Any ideas??
Alright for a start…did you try checking things out with the real configurator that comes with windows? Search for the program disk managment and it will tell you if anything is not normal. Keep in mind the file system does take up some hard drive space, not 12gb though. When you install a new version of windows onto a drive without formatting you always get some lost space as well. You could have also changed the file system when you did this, which means now you have 2 file systems on the one drive but only one active. That could account for some of the space. Some viruses also make disk space unusable and the virus could still be on your computer now since you kept your old files on, and just reinstalled windows.
There’s a few strange things going on here. First, unless the virus messed with your BIOS, you should have been able to hit DEL to access it. If it did mess with it, then reinstalling Windows from another computer wouldn’t help since the BIOS stays with the MB. Second, just because you reinstalled Windows doesn’t mean the virus is gone. You need to run a virus scanner for that.
That said, I’ve had a similar problem numerous times (under all flavors of Windows from 95 to XP). Scandisk always seems to fix it for me, but if that doesn’t work it may be worth your while to buy Norton Sys Utils.
My first thought is this…do you have explorer configured to show hidden files? By default, it is not, and without hidden files shown, “Select All” won’t actually select them…this could account for the discrepancy, since especially under c:\Documents and Settings, whole directory trees tend to be normally hidden.
In the picture you showed us, you didn’t have Show Hidden Files turned on. If you did, there would be two hidden folders: “System Volume Information” and “RECYCLER.” The former is NTFS stuff and if you ever try to get into it, it will always say “Access Denied” (saftey feature so no one but the machine can edit it) The latter is your recycle bin. There would also have been many more hidden system files - Autoexec.bat, boot.ini, config.sys just to name a few. Turn on Show Hidden Files and try it again.
I looked at the discrepencies on my hd between hidden files on and hidden files off, and I had about a gig discrepency. But then again, my C partition is only 5 gigs (I set it up this way so the only thing on my C drive is windows so that once it comes to reformat, I only have to reformat the C drive and the rest of my data is left in tact).
Although I really doubt it is this simple of a linear relationship, if I have a 1 gig hidden-vs-non-hidden discrepency on a 5 gig partition, if you were to use the same percentage on at 60 gig partition, that would be a 12 gig discrepency. Again, I doubt it’s this simple, but it is a pretty close coincidence.
I think Hidden Files are your main problem - on my C drive, right clicking everything and comparing that number to the general “Free Space” is pretty close. It’s not exact, but thats because Windows has some Special Files it doesn’t exactly tally up like normal files. Aside from turning on Hidden Files, you need to look into Virtual Memory and Indexing. Virtual Memory (or Paging Files) is hard drive space that Windows uses as RAM. By default, Windows grabs however much it thinks it needs, and this changes from session to session (you check this by Control Panel > System Properties > Advanced > Performance: Settings > Advanced > Virtual Memory). The file is called pagefile.sys, and it’s hidden. This can be quite large (mine’s about .8 gigs). Indexing is a service that allows you to search for files on your harddrive faster, but this works by building a database of all the files on your harddrive, and so, this takes up memory. From the screenshots, I can see that you have this enabled (C: Drive > Right Click > Properties > at bottom of screen). I’m not sure exactly how much memory this takes up, but you’ve got almost 100,000 files and 10,000 folders, so I’m sure this database isn’t small.
No, I said I turned it on and checked. I have hidden files but they don’t make up more than .1gb… because it still says that I have 19.2gb… Which is why it’s so confusing.
