I have a 40 GB USB hard drive formatted with NTFS on a PC running Windows XP Pro, SP3. I am trying to free as much space as possible. Windows Explorer tells me that I have about 200 MB of files on the drive (showing hidden and system files). When I show drive properties however it shows 73% free, around 10 GB used.
I ran CHKDSK and it found all kinds of problems.
Now running defrag and it is behaving as if there were 10 GB of files, but I can't access them anywhere.
How to find and remove this extra 10GB?
Best Answer
Format? That's pretty much the smoothest way of cleaning out a filesystem.. replacing it. :D
If you are storing large files selecting a larger allocation unit will reduce overheads.
I went from about 300MB in the MFT to less than 10MB after formating with a 64K allocation unit and copying back the data. This was on a 250GB NTFS volume.
I'd also look at system restore. Try running WinDirStat as SYSTEM using
PsExecand see if there are large files under System Volume Information named Restore{GUID}.To delete all but the most recent shadow copy for every volume on your system, go to Disk Cleanup, select "Clean up System files", then use the 2nd button on the "More Options" tab.
To clear just one volume disable and then re-enable shadow copies for the volume from the "System Protection" tab of System Properties.
(If you're interested in the size of your MFT, look at the output of
defrag /a)