help, my recovery disk is full!

Originally posted by PhoenixOD
reply to post by XeroOne

 

Can you point me to an official article that backs up your claims.

I should imagine most books on basic computing will mention it somewhere. Think of it this way: You have a computer with limited resources trying to calculate a colossal number of sporadic unused blocks across a large capacity drive. Windows isn't really going to immediately display the correct amount of free space in that situation.

The infallible source that is Wikipedia should fill you in on the basics:
Link here...

reply to post by XeroOne


Well as a Microsoft Certified Professional and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist ive read quite a few 'basic books on computing'.

As everyone has said in this thread defragging just reorganizes you file system and does not give you back any free space. But if you can find a Technet, support.microsoft.com or MSDN article that says otherwise id be happy to read it.

From support at Microsoft:

The disk space allocation of an NTFS volume may appear to be misreported for any of the following reasons:

The NTFS volume's cluster size is too large for the average-sized files that are stored there.
File attributes or NTFS permissions prevent Windows Explorer or a Windows command prompt from displaying or accessing files or folders.
The folder path exceeds 255 characters.
Folders or files contain invalid or reserved file names.
NTFS metafiles (such as the Master File Table) have grown, and you cannot de-allocate them.
Files or folders contain alternate data streams.
NTFS corruption causes free space to be reported as in use.
Other NTFS features may cause file-allocation confusion.

Source

Originally posted by PhoenixOD
reply to post by XeroOne

 

Well as a Microsoft Certified Professional and a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist i ive read quite a few 'basic books on computing'. As everyone has said in this thread defragging just reorganizes you file system and does not give you back any free space.

But if you can find a Technet or MSDN article that says otherwise id be happy to read it.

To re-iterate, I never said defragging would free any space. I said the disk might be seriously fragmented, and Windows could be having problems calculating the amount of free space left because of the aforementioned fragmentation.

Oh, look: [QUOTE]NTFS corruption causes free space to be reported as in use.[/QUOTE]
That was pretty much my point all along, but there's a good chance fragmentation's causing the problem.

Oh, look: [QUOTE]NTFS corruption causes free space to be reported as in use.[/QUOTE]
That was pretty much my point all along, but there's a good chance fragmentation's causing the problem.

NTFS File System Corruption is nothing to do with fragmented files

Its corrected by running chkdsk like other members in this thread have correctly suggested. Not by de-fragging.

In very rare circumstances, the NTFS Metafiles $MFT or $BITMAP may become corrupted and result in lost disk space.

You can identify and fix this issue by running the chkdsk /f command against the volume. Toward the end of chkdsk, you receive the following message if you must adjust the $BITMAP:

Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFT) BITMAP attribute. CHKDSK discovered free space marked as allocated in the volume bitmap. Windows has made corrections to the file system.

All this advice ignores one basic problem: People buy computers off the shelf, take them home, and use the hell out of them without knowing anything about how they work--until they're so thoroughly thrashed that only radical surgery can salvage them.

I put much of the blame on the manufacturers. Never mind the "restore" partitions, and all the unhelpful too-late BS about external backup drives. If it weren't for the simple idiocy of putting everything--both applications and data storage--on a single large partition, it might be possible for someone who knows what they're doing to help people over the internet. The simple expedient of using a small, reasonably-sized "operating" partition and a much larger "data" partition could save a huge amount of heartache.

That's what I practice--and that's what I do for everyone whose computer I work on. And while I'm at it, once the "operating" partition is clean, defragged, and virus-free, I make an image of the operating-system partition and put it aside.

Anyway, here's my advice:

1. Get an external backup drive. Get your sister's 15-year-old kid--or someone else who knows what they're doing--to come over and move a bunch of the extraneous crap onto it, for safekeeping and to get enough of it out of the way to do some maintenance.

2. Partition the drive; keep only a large enough C: partition to hold all the applications, the "pagefile.sys," and "hiberfil.sys" (if you use hibernation), plus a few gigs of backout room.

3. Separate out the data from the operating system. A great deal of that can be accomplished by simply moving "Documents" to the new, larger partition. It's a simple operation. Here's one of many thousands of websites with instructions: Move the "Documents" or "My Documents" folder (Vista & XP)

4. Clean up the C: drive and defrag it. IMAGE THE DRIVE. Put one copy of the image on the new, larger partition (for convenience) and one copy on the external drive (for safety).

It's a full day's work, but you'll never go begging on the internet for help again....

Edit that: You'll never go begging for help for this particular problem again....

I would like to throw in one little extra piece of advice to all this expert advice your getting. Don't use windows Defrag, it isn't that good in the first place. It's a virtual defrag and isn't as good as some third party software.

Use Auslogics defrag. It's free, and can be found download.com (or anywhere else for that matter). IMHO one of the best defraging software on the market.

reply to post by othwald


What is a virtual defrag?