Hard Drive says it is full when it isn't

[alohaman]

I just got a new thinkpad a couple of weeks ago and it says I have 800 mb of 50 gb remaining on my hard drive. I have about 10 gb of music on here but not much of anything else, so I searched for large files and found none. I then used a drive utility off the internet and it measured the drive as having about 25/50 gb used which makes much more sense.

Has this problem happened to anyone else? Also, the top screen of my laptop appears to be checkered when I have firefox or ie open. The box looks like the normal tan/greyish with random checkers of a lighter greyish/tan. Is the screen damaged?

[pianowizard]

it says I have 800 mb of 50 gb remaining on my hard drive.

What does "it" mean?

[alohaman]

When I right click and view the properties of the drive. Also, when I was downloading some files a message will pop up saying there is limited space left on the drive.

[pianowizard]

It doesn't make sense that the software you downloaded would report a different measurement. Perhaps there are two partitions and you have 800MB free space on one and 25GB free space on the other? Also, it might be worth doing a disk cleanup (Windows' Disk Cleanup is okay, but CCleaner would be more thorough -- download it from ccleaner.com) and see what happens. It's possible you have lots of hidden junk files which are invisible to the utility that you downloaded, but visible to Windows.

[FragrantHead]

I assume you are running some flavor of Windows. Under Win9x/Me, run ScanDisk. Under Win 2000/XP, run

chkdsk /f

at a command prompt.

Also, in Internet Explorer, Tools / Internet Options / General / Temporary Internet Files / Delete Files.

It is theoretically possible for the drive to report as full, but only half full with another utility, if you have lots and lots of small files. There are 2 types of file systems, FAT and NTFS. Both will use up a minimum amount of space per file. With FAT, this is called the cluster size and on large disks it is typically 32k. Thus for example, if you filled the drive with 16k files, half of the disk space would be wasted, since Windows allocates 32k for each file, regardless. That said, music files should be larger and the wasted space on a hard disk is typically nowhere near 50%.