Hard Drive Free Space Size is incorrect

[Jesse Torres]

My Used Space / Free Space capacity on my Hard Drive is incorrect. I have a 10 GB HD = 9.54 Total Capacity.

I had 4.83 GB of used space over the weekend. I then transferred various files to my HD; as a result, my Used space quickly jumped to 8.83 GB with only 727 MB of free space. I deleted all the files that I had transferred to my HD. I received a message from Windows, �Your recycle bin isn�t large enough, do you want to permanently delete these files?� I clicked yes to permanently delete the files.

The files were deleted; unfortunately, my HD used space is still 8.83 GB even though I deleted all files that totaled 4 GB.

I am running XP Pro Service pack 2. I have run Error-Checking utility thinking that it would alleviate the problem. I have also run Reg-cleaner to no avail. I also turned off System restore and deleted all system restore points.

Does anyone have any tips?

[Jeroen Wenting]

defragment your drive.
Quite likely free blocks have been left fragmented into elements too small to allocate to files and are therefore not counted.
Also empty your recyble bin, possibly some things did end up there.

[Jesse Torres]

Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:
defragment your drive.
Quite likely free blocks have been left fragmented into elements too small to allocate to files and are therefore not counted.
Also empty your recyble bin, possibly some things did end up there.

I just ran Defrag on my HD. During the process, I received the following error:

Volume(C) has only 7% free space available for use by Disk Defragmenter. To run effectively, Disk Defragmenter requires at least 15% usable free space. There is not enough disk space to properly complete the operation. Delete some unneeded files on your hard disk, and then try again.

Do you want to run Disk Defragmenter now anyway?
Yes / No

I selected �yes� and continued with the process. It didn�t resolve my problem.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,
[ February 08, 2005: Message edited by: Jesse Torres ]

[Jesse Torres]

After running Defrag, I received message that some files couldn�t be defragmented. These files were the culprit. The files totaled over 4GB of space. I deleted the files and now my hard drive free and used space is correct.

Thanks Jeroen for suggesting a Defrag!