Thread: Hard Drive Space Issues

I have a Dellinspiron 6400 with Vista Ultimate SPlloaded on it. It runs an Intel Centrino Duo (1.73 GHz) with 1 GB of memory and a 120 GB HDD.
f have a few queries. Like I mentioned, I have a 120 GB hard drive. I'm able to use only 110 GB of the 120 GB. When I bought the laptop, it had Vista Home Premium and the local drive (C was a 110 GB and there was a backup drive of 10 GB. However even after formatting it completely and deleting the backup drive, I still don't get the complete 120 GB of space. I re-partitioned the drive as C (49.9 GB), D (29.9 GB) and E (31.7 GB). It adds up to 111.5 GB.

Is there anyway of using the remaining drive space as even the backup feature has stopped functioning now? I used to run Disk Cleanup every week. It used to free up a maximum of 500 KB of space. Three months back, I installed Uniblue SpeedUpMyPC and Registry Booster. I stopped using Disk Cleanup. Now two days back when I started Disk Cleanup and scanned my 29.9 GB partition, it says that 159 GB can be freed when my entire drive itself is only 120 GB! My friend too had the same issue after install¬ing some software. And he did disk cleanup. All of his software got uninstalled and Vista crashed. I don't know what to do now.

I am sure that there are no viruses on my laptop as I download and install software only from trusted sites and I use the latest version of Kaspersky 2009. I keep it updated.

The problem with the drive space is because of the conversion of bytes to kilo¬bytes and megabytes and so on. A kilobyte is actually a 1024 bytes not a 1000. All this adds up to a big number when you calculate capacities such as 120 GB. For example, an advertised 750 GB drive is actually close to 698 GB. The same is the C;1se with your 120 GB drive.

If your Disk Cleanup is showing strange hard drive space values, try running a chkdsk on all the partitions. To do this, click on Start > Run. Type chkds k c: / f and click OK. You might be needed to restart. Do the same step for all the partitions and the incorrect space issue might get solved.