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  • #2279309

    Phantom Disk Usage

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    by sean ·

    I have a 80GB physical drive partitioned into two logical drives – 20GB and 60GB. My 60GB drive has only 17GB of data on it (counting hidden and system files). However, XP thinks the drive is full (only 1% free space). I don’t have a pagefile on this drive (its only a data drive) and can’t think of anything else that would be hogging the space. I’m running Norton Pro 2003 and it hasn’t found a virus. Anyone have a suggestion???

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    • #3364989

      Reply To: Phantom Disk Usage

      by sgt_shultz ·

      In reply to Phantom Disk Usage

      see if this mskb article helps any:
      315688 How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes in Windows XP
      search by article number at support.microsoft.com

    • #3542522

      Reply To: Phantom Disk Usage

      by joseph moore ·

      In reply to Phantom Disk Usage

      Another possibility (although remote) is a little-known “feature” of the NTFS disk formatting known as Alternate Data Streams.
      You can hide files in an alternate data stream, and those files will NOT be listed in at all, but they take up drive space.
      Read here for details:
      http://patriot.net/~carvdawg/docs/dark_side.html

    • #3542477

      Reply To: Phantom Disk Usage

      by w2ktechman ·

      In reply to Phantom Disk Usage

      I have run into this on NT4 machines, I reinstalled the service pack to fix the problem.

    • #3383765

      Reply To: Phantom Disk Usage

      by sean ·

      In reply to Phantom Disk Usage

      This question was closed by the author

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