Where's my HD gone?

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Hi All

First post & hopefully soemone can help. I have a DELL Inspiron E1405 laptop that has a 105GB HD, the HD is showing 47GB used & 53GB free, the thing is i have hardly anything on the HD! I went to the defrag section & there is ahuge lump of red in there ater running defrag & getting the defrag report it shows this "files that did not fragment":

Fragments File Size File name

24 34.19GB documents and settings/my name/loc....

Does this mean that 34GB of my HD is no good?

Thanks

 

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I think that will be your partition size, that will be why you cant defrag it.

And just to add its probably best to introduce yourself in the new members section.

 

Hi and welcome to CF superblue. Firstly, a hard drive when formatted loses a chunk on its original size. But in your current case scenario if you hard drive is formatted as a FAT partition then this can read only a certain size and if its formatted as NTFS then that's another aspect to look into as well.

What programs or applications do you currently hard installed on the laptop?

 

I have XP OS & just a few programmes, lierally just a few Gig I'm not very tech minded at all so forgive if i ask what you mean about FAT, NTFS etc.....in defrag it shows file system NTFS............the laptop was meant to come with 120GB HD so I kind of get the idea where soem of it's gone onoski when you say about formatting but i don't understand why I have that huge lump of red there? Can i get it back?

 

I still think its the size of your hard drive partition.

 

I will go to the new members page thanks

 

you cant change the partition size unless you get a specially designed program for it.

 

Possibly the *recovery* partition?

This is where all the data is kept in the event that you need to do a full system recovery. Hence it contains an image or whatever of the operating system ie Visa/XP and all of the applications and drivers that the laptop came with.

 

just add what Bluerinse said, if you have a recovery partition aswell as the usuall partition then a lot of space will be used up.

I dont have a recovery partition but my hard drive is 250GB but I only see 238GB because of the partition.

 

Dell recovery partions are about 10 gig, so i doubt it is that. Just to be clear, is your problem that you don't think you have 47 gb worth of data on the drive?

 

download WinDirStat (Windows Directory Statistics) to see if this can help your situation.

 

What are you trying to defrag? Or in other words, what is hogging so much space? What causes files to defrag is persistant use of that particular space from files being deleted and replaced by different sized files, and existing files being resized - so it's clear that that particular space is frequently accessed.

Have you tried running ccleaner? Download, install and clean all the junk from your HD, then reattempt the defrag.

 

If you are having issues with Defrag, try;

Starting in Safe mode
disable network connection
any other items in start up
any 3rd party antivirus and firewall applications (in fact any major applications that are running via task manager)

and then give it a shot (try ccleaner before the defrag as mentioned above)

 

Yep, try defragging in safe mode. Also, do you get a report saying exactly which files couldn't be defragged?

 

Not true actually GBL. There are tools in XP (Disk Management MMC & Diskpart) that can allow you to resize partitions, and if the circumstances are right, extend partitions that already have data on without it being affected.

 

That depends on the type of partition though, and usually a partition on the hard drive is the type you can not change unless you get some software like partition magic.

 

He said it was NTFS but didn't say wether it was a primary or extended partition. I would asume its just a normal basic jobby.

 

Im lost as to why partions have got anything to do with the orignal post.

 

where do you think his space has gone then?

He says he hasn't got much on the hard drive and there is a large part he cant defrag. One part must be a normal partition and the other could be a recovery partition.