Where's my missing space on the C drive?

[nihil]

Eileen seems to use that as an excuse also.............

[rcgreen]

It seems that Vista is hiding something that selecting "view hidden folders" still doesn't show.

Maybe your TPM is reserving a large hidden partition where the black
helicopters can land.

Sorry, couldn't resist. There may really be a trend here to
reserve lots of hidden space though. System restore is just
the tip of the iceberg. I expect to click on a folder that
says "What are you doing Dave?"

[SirDice]

With NTFS on Vista we have several options where this space has gone..

* Slack
Even though NTFS uses relatively small 512byte blocks if you store a 513byte file it'll take up 1024bytes on disk. If there are a lot of files all these little bits may add up.

* Metadata
NTFS stores a lot of additional 'housekeeping'. Things like filenames, timestamps, permissions (ACLs), even file data.

* Alternate Data Streams
You can hide a lot of information in ADS. Malware can use it to hide itself and/or it's data.

[Moira]

Yes I can understand that, though if a 513 byte file took up 1024 bytes on disk, would it not show accurate space used?

I don't think any of that could be as large as to account from 25GB - and the fact that both of us had the identical issue means it isn't likely due to malware. (I like to think I know if I get malware anyway )

Finally I phoned you nihil! I can tell everyone here, nihil is a lovely person and his wife is equally nice. Friendly and warm, I think I've made two friends for life.

[SirDice]

Added filesizes is just that. You wouldn't want a 513byte file show up as 1024. Space free on the other hand is 1024 less. But slack isn't the problem, that would only account for a small percentage.. With FAT32 and big disks it is a big percentage, hence i asked..

There is a lot of metadata though.. Not sure about scanners that can read that but there are scanners for ADS.

Looking for some good info on the MFT (Master File Table; the metadata) I noticed I made a small mistake. 512 byte blocks are used on volumes <512MB. For 80G it's 4096 bytes.

http://technet2.microsoft.com/window....mspx?mfr=true

[Moira]

Thanks for that SirDice. I can understand the principle of a file size showing up accurately, but the amount of space left for fresh data being the size of the file and then some. I know you used to be able to squeeze extra onto a floppy disk by copying across rather than doing a "save as". But these are relatively small amounts - I'm inclined to think some major files have to be hidden with 25GB unaccounted for. I mean, disks didn't used to be much bigger than that! If a computer couldn't use the space at the end of blocks when the disk was almost full, it wouldn't be much use.

I'll read the link, cheers.

[xen248]

So in other words Vista takes control off most of the system from the user in an attempt to secuer itself?

[nihil]

I would guess that the answer is the MTF.

It will default to 12.5% under older versions of NTFS. then 25%, 37.5% and 50%

You set a value in the Registry from 1-4

[Moira]

Well in total out of my 80GB C partition, 25GB was unaccounted for. You could be right - is it easy or even wise to change the values though? (Even if you knew where the registry entry was!)

Reading this would suggest it was better left alone.

[nihil]

Yes Moira,

And you can't mess with it without a reformat............ at least in Win 2000 and XP

OK. Let's give this a bit of thought?

1. The restore points can grow and grow, and you won't see them. I don't know Vista but in XP you have a max of 12%.
2. Indexing is deadly. Unless you have thousands of files it is a waste of space.
3. Not sure that you will actually "see" all the temporary and cache files in Vista.

Try the "disk cleanup" utility and CCleaner?

When you say "unaccounted for", what exactly do you mean? Did you total all the folders in the C:\ drive?

EDIT: You haven't got anything left over from Linux have you......... swap partition? whatever.............. my box with Linux on its own drive doesn't even get that drive detected in Windows