Problem with my hard-drive

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 5:04 pm

i've been trying to squeeze by with my 20 GB hard drive for a quite some time. in the past few months, with my forays into DOS, emulation (mame in particular), and doujin. my remaining space has been hovering around 1 gig or less.

yesterday, after trying out the aquisitions of the day, and uninstalling them after they have proved unsatisfactory i noticed something... in the properties panel, my hard disk remaining capacity is not changing. tried removing a few extra undesirables i had lying around (out of curiosity), still no change. tried restarting, no change.

anyone have any ideas about what is going on? are there any risks on the files i have on the disk?

my plan was to get a new hard drive, and set up my old as a secondary to grab the files i want. still viable? should i see about borrowing a cd burner or something instead?

anyway, i'm freaked because i use the thing everyday, and am hoping i won't have to cease and desist.

SAM · Post by **SAM** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 5:43 pm

Well, that might be the stuff you delete is taking up too little disk spaces, so you don't notice the changes.

To free up disk spaces, you should first have an idea of where all those spaces are gone. Usual disk spaces killers are music files (MP3), vedio files (Films, Animes, Shmups Replay, etc).

Deleting a Doujin game (4M to 100M), MAME ROM images (20k to 25M), and PC shmups games (4M to 100M) won't help much, since they aren't taking up much spaces anyway.

it290 · Post by **it290** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 5:45 pm

Hmm, that is a weird one. I have seen Windows fail to refresh that a few times, but if it persists in that manner, it could well be a problem with the filesystem. Doesn't mean the drive is physically failing, but you might end up losing data anyway. Any 20gig drive is probably nearing the end of its operational life by now, although I've seen drives last a lot longer (I have a 52M Quantum drive that's still working). I would certainly recommend doing a backup. In fact, you might as well just buy another hard drive, as they're about as cost-effective as CDs these days and are much less of a pain to deal with. If you buy a 400G drive or so, you're not going to really notice if you have that extra 20G around or not.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:13 pm

some of the files i've been uninstalling have been large (like the 300 meg Hitman: Contracts demo), so it has nothing to do with filesize.

and i am planning on buying a new hard drive, i'm just trying to make sure that when i get the new one and i disconnect the old, some inherrant problem isn't going to go around erasing my data willy nilly.

and the cd-burner idea is just me thinking of a fail-safe. so i can have the files on cd in case something does happen with the hard drive while swapping its placement on the "strappy thing" inside the comp.

thanks a lot guys. i appreciate it, hopefully next weeks paycheck will be substantial enough for me to get something in the 160 GB range.

and a 20GB drive is out of place in this modern age. when a single game
takes up a quarter of your drive. you have a problem

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also sort of an aside: the windows disk defragmenter utility, what is the general time frame on a complete cycle? it takes my computer a couple hours to go through the disk.

Damocles · Post by **Damocles** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:19 pm

Umm...have you tried the obvious? Perhaps "deleting" files is just set up to move them to the recycle bin? If so, you're space won't change until it's emptied.

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 6:44 pm

sorry, i figured people would assume i'd empty the bin.

TalkingOctopus · Post by **TalkingOctopus** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:10 pm

What OS are you using? You might want to try defragging. You may end up with more space after a defrag.

thesuperkillerxxx · Post by **thesuperkillerxxx** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 7:51 pm

Shouldn't be using the magnetic based media for archival....

it290 · Post by **it290** » Thu Mar 23, 2006 8:25 pm

Shouldn't be using the magnetic based media for archival....
_________________

Why not? A HD packed away properly has a longer shelf life than your average CD-R.

Post by **Shatterhand** » Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:15 am

Hey, I have a 3.2mb HD for 8 years now, which is working perfectly. It doesn't have ONE SINGLE damaged sector or anything.

It's just a little bit noisy

My biggest HD in my computer is 20gb big. I have 3 HDs, two 10gb big and one 20gb big.

I am cheap

captain ahar · Post by **captain ahar** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 5:53 pm

since my last post. i found an old computer in my garage. to add insult to injury, its hard drive is bigger than the one i have in my "work horse" pc.

the thing is running windows 2000 and is slower than a son of a bitch. the previous owners were really stupid about this thing: it is a pentium 1 with 128 MB ram, and a 36 GB hard drive. so after windows 2000 loads up, most of the computer is already spoken for.

however, for now i'm using it as a storage space. soon i hope to get ahold of a windows 98 disc, and then i can format the harddrive reinstall windows, and i should be a little better off until i can update my real computer... -_-

thanks for the help everyone.

edit: oh, and as far as being on topic goes, my computer stopped with the nonsense i was originally complaining about. everything seems to be in order.

so if you'll excuse me i must away to try and clear up more room for Gothic 2! 2.2 gigs!