Greetings!

Windows 98SE, IE6.0
Hard drive divided into C,D,E, & F FAT 32 partitions for my convenience and file organization.

C: drive is roughly 6 GB; with about 3 GB Used and 3 GB Free Space.

No recent partition changes, etc. All working well.

My story:
I set BIOS to boot from CD drive and ran LindowsLive (runs from CD). Made some changes in configuration, etc. as I checked it out. I shut it down, rebooted, reset BIOS to boot from HDD, and restarted.

When I began to use Windows I was greeted with a message that said I was out of hard drive space and that C: partition had 105 kB left. Yikes! All other partitions were okay. I clicked on My Computer and checked out C: drive properties. Sure enough, I had no free space left on C: partition.

I then adjusted my swapfile to give me a few MB breathing room so I could run a few programs, rebooted, and opened Partition Magic 4.0. It showed that I had 3 GB free space! A quick check of C: drive properties again and it showed zero free space. In PM I clicked on Operations - Info - Cluster Waste and found that I had 3 GB of data and 3 GB was identified as wasted space!!!! This additional information was also provided:

"Disk space is allocated one cluster at a time. If the data does not fill a cluster the remaining space is wasted."

HOWEVER, the graph showed only 3% wasted space for the entire drive. So, conflicting info.

Wasted space. What to do? I did a defrag and it all cleared up. However, I'd like to understand this.

Q: Why did this happen? What happened at the drive level/cluster level? Is it a coincidence that this happened after trying out LwindowsLive?


Janusz
Age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes age comes alone.

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