4GB freed suddenly
 

I have 4 partitions on my HD, one of which is 15GB. That is the primary partition, my C: drive, which I use probably 90% of the time. Well I filled it up almost completely; 200 megs left. So to clear it out for now, I moved an ISO to another partition(648MB), and deleted Java 2 RE (200MB) and application that used it (40MB).

I add up the amounts as I go thinking I have about 1GB free now.
200MB + 650MB + 200MB + 40MB = about 1.1GB...

I go to defrag and it says that I have 5.02GB free space on my C: drive. I think defrag.exe must be corrupt so I check it at My Computer and that also says 5GB free. I have a lot of important stuff on here that I can't lose so I'm starting to worry.

So I have 2 questions...
1. Any one have any ideas of how I got 4GB from seemingly no where?
2. Is there a log of all the files deleted?

maybe java is 5 gigs? lol... dunno

I sure hope so, because I don't know what I might be missing, and I wouldn't be surprised either, seeing how efficient Java is in the first place. But then again, I didn't have 4 gigs clear when I installed it.

well, this is a long shot. but all drives come with extra space reserved for when things go bad in some sectors. You aren't supposed to be able to access it, but if something failed, you might now be writing to that extra part of the harddrive. I kinda doubt this, but who knows. *shrug*

run scandisk. It will re-calculate your space.

i know the SDks are quite large, but not that big... maybe you somehow cleared out your prefetch or something?

some programs are weird that way.......emule for instance takes up less than 15 megs but it showed up in add remove programs as 4 gigs for me....

I just ran scandisk (chkdsk) and my free space is showing the same amount. I had already cleared out the prefetch to try to gain space. This is puzzling and scaring me more and more since it doesn't seem like anything is missing, while at the same time I know I had more stuff on here than the the used space is currently showing. Thanks for all your help, I really hope I find out what it is.

i recognize the reference, but this isn't the same situation.

just curious, but when you moved the iso did you have to unmount it? also how much of your page file is normally in use?

page files that clear can reveal a shit ton of space. same with browser history, and what have you.

thats cause it includes downloaded files in that.

somewhere in administrative tools is "disk manaement system" or something like that - tells you tons about your HD. . . maybe you can find something about it in there?

ADDED: ooh!ooh! do you have quotas enabled maybe you hit your quota, OR your page file is on that drive, and once you come close to that amount of space it reports only what you can write to.

No, I didn't have to unmount anything to move the ISO I don't think, but I'm not quite sure I follow. My page file is at 192MB, I've never seen it higher, actually (max is at 384MB). I did clear out my history, but I hadn't surfed that much since the last time I cleared it out (about two weeks ago), but it must still be a big source of the data that's missing.

I think you are talking about Computer Management. It has a disk section for management (partitioning and formatting) and defrag. The disk management says that the partition is healthy. I don't have a quota set for any users.

when i mount iso's it has to dump to my page, but thats cuz i don't have much ram.

besides your page file isn't that big, so the iso unmount idea is totally bunk.