Missing data space (XP sp3)

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As some of you are aware, I have been having space problems for several weeks. I finally proved there is a massive amount of space on my C Drive that is missing(?)

I bought an new external drive and decided to see what happened if I copied my entire C drive to a directory on the new F Drive. Attached is a pdf showing Tree Size Reports on the empty F drive, the entire C Drive, and the resulting new folder on F Drive.

To make a long story short – the F Drive initially had 233 GB of free space, The C Drive Tree Size Report agreed with the display of the C Drive in MY Computer – showed 108 GB total on C Drive with 100 GB used and approx 1/2 GB of free space on C Drive.

I ran an XCOPY of the c:*.* to a directory on F Drive – result was that only approx 8 GB were transferred to the F Drive.

The resulting F Drive Tree Size Report shows that only 8 GB came across

The attachment to this post shows an “annotated” combined pdf of all three situations.

I need ideas about how to track down this anomaly that shows up both in the “My Computer” listing of files (108 GB used with 1/2 GB available, and on the Tree Size Report.

I did run a CHKDSK on the NTFS C Drive – with no errors found.

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First, you could not copy your entire boot drive when you logged on in Windows: Windows prevents you from copying files which are “in use”.

Second, you have no rights to access many system files on your C Drive (mainly for security reasons).

Third, you can “flush” some caches on your drive and regain a lot of space. Delete junk from Temp folder in your profile, delete temporary Internet Explorer files, decrease amount of space occupied by System Restore, disable Hibernation, empty Java cache, etc., etc.

And the last – the most important: a lot of space is occupied by your personal files – documents, music, pictures, movies, etc. I didn’t see any Windows XP installation which occupies more than 10 GB – the rest is your files. Move them from C:Documents and Settings My Documents to the external drive. But remember: some folders in My Documents folder are system folders and are not movable. You can use xcopy to copy files to external drive and then delete them from your C Drive.

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with the combination of xcopy switches and a tool called “who Lock Me” I am able to copy everything exce[t one file (system volume information).

I have been working with two friends to track the missing space down. At this point we are convinced that the NTFS space allocation is messed up and are working with a NTFS utility to audit all of the space on the c drive. So far the audit has been working for 18 hours – not sure when it will finish.

If this does not work, the next step is to reformat C: and start from Scratch

Tom

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After trying every NTSF utility I could find, all to no avail, I bit the bullet and did a complete format on c:.

That fixed the missing approx 100GB’s, everything adds up now.

In the process now of reinstalling everything on C:

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