Weirdo problems with reported free space.

I got done doing a bit of self cleanup on my drive, and after all was said and done I had 14.5 gigs free of my 20 gig drive.

I then ran disk defragmentor and after about an hour or 2 it was done and I rebooted.

After the reboot my free space had changed from 14.5 gigs free to only 8.3 free.

How is this possible?

I didn't do anything other than reboot and then check to see how much space I have.

My temp internet files and recycle bin are empty, and disk cleanup tells me there is only 25 megs worth if junk it can remove.

I have heard of viruses that can inflate the size of a file when opened, but I ran Norton 2002 and nothing was found. Also, like I said I didn't open anything after rebooting.

Can someone clue me in here as to what is happening? I'm confused, and peeved at the same time.

Any help would be appreciated, thanx.

I wouldn't like to guess, but there is a nice trial utility called diskdata that graphically represents your files and folder showing you where the disk space is being used. <a href="http://www.digallery.com/" target="_blank">This is the home page, you want the second utility - diskdata</a>

Nifty little program, it did help me to locate some big problem areas and I managed to free up 2 gigs of stuff I didn't need, but that still leaves me 4 gigs short of what it told me I had. Could this have just been an error because my drive was so fragmented?

I had this same scenerio recently while clearing mass ammounts of files off my work hard drive as a slave drive attached to my home pc, where it said I only had like 4 gigs free when I knew it was closer to 11 gigs. (I cleared a lotta space ;) ) Basically it wasn't reporting the free space that I had just cleared.

When I ran scandisk and defrag on it, it came up saying that "scandisk has found an error with the amount of free space being reported" and also found some file fragments, I don't know why yours is not finding this; in fact this is from my c:\scandisk.log

[quote]Log file generated at 13:29 on 3/23/2002.

ScanDisk used the following options:
Standard test

Drive Win 98 [D :] contained the following errors:

ScanDisk found 868352 bytes of data in 9 lost file fragment(s).
Resolution: Convert the lost file fragment(s) into file(s)
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

The drive contained an error in its FSInfoSector.
Resolution: Repair the error
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

ScanDisk found errors on this drive and fixed them all.

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I think the FSInfoSector entry is refering to the file system free space.

I would suggest running scandisk again to see if it finds the problem this time, now that it has had a chance to rest from all the file moving :)