I was checking up the amount of space on my HD (its 38gbs (40 is what the box said lol) and it says that like im using it all up but 4gb's.

"Untrue, no way" I thought to myself. so I entered my C: drive and highlighted all the folders and files in there. Right Clicked, went to properties and it says that only 28gb's are being used. Anyone have any idea where the rest of my hard drive space may be?

Temp internet files, cache, etc etc the list goes on!

do a scandisk on the hard drive, the hard drive can sometimes report incorrect disk space amounts.

but a scan disk usually fixes it.

The hard drive is 40 gb unformatted. You lost 2 gb with the formatting. No way around this.
Try to do a search for files and folders over 2 mb. You will be suprised at what you find. Many files are left behind when you uninstall programs.

what does windows report the disc size to be?

maybe when the disc was partioned the partion was made 30 gb instead of 40

it happens

if windows reports it at 38gb then its all there, its just in use

What Operating System are you using?

What kind of computer do you have? I know Comcrap ...uhh.... I mean Compaq :) along with some other companies use part of the hard drive for their utility/diagnostic programs and also a factory image for a system restore.

lets see... the partition is 38.2gb

windows XP

I tried scan disk but it told me I had to lose a whole bunch of my files (movies mainly :)) so im thinking that may be it.


I already cleared my temp internet files.

and ive never heard of you losing 2gb's from formatting ??


I didnt answer them all in the correct order, but youll get it. Im usually pretty PC smart. I got my A+ and im taking college courses for numorous computer tech stuff (internet, hardware, operating systems, ect..) but this problem just completely stumped me :)

thanks all :)

Phh.. I woke up one morning and all my dear media files were gone. 3GB just dissapeared. I think they went to Heaven... :D

Well, hard drive manufacturers kinda lie too...

They call them 40 gigabyte hard drives. Their real storage amount is:
40,000 megabytes

A 'real' gigabyte is more. It's like this:

1024 bytes in a kilobyte
1024 kilobytes in a megabyte
1024 megabytes in a gigabyte

So when you install your brand new 120 gig hard drive, you'll start off with considerably less.

-David

yeah I know ;) im thinking that its all the large files I keep on my hard drive. my hard drive is like 62% fragmented and it tells me what files I should remove in order to get it to where defrag can repair it. So im pretty sure its in my large files :)