Discrepancy in "disk usage"

Parallels Build 3188
Mac OS X 10.4.9

I have an XP VM that has a weird situation. If I right-click on the "C" drive, and select Properties, I see 11.2Gb in use with 8.26Gb free (expected, as I have an auto-resizing 20Gb disk).

However, if I open windows explorer, select ALL files on the C Drive, and right-click -> Properties, it shows 6.11Gb in "size" with 6.14 "size on disk".... Wy the almost 100% discrepancy. All I have on this machine is XP, Office 2003, and Outlook (with about 2Gb of "pst" files)

In other words, the ~6Gb of space sounds right, but the Disk Properties showing 11Gb doesn't. If I run the compressor, it doesn't help at all, and I still end up with a 11Gb disk file.

Oh, and I've already run "chkdsk /F C:" to see if there are any errors. There arent'.

Any thoughts how to get my drive size back down to a reasonable 6Gb size???

TIA, Steve

 

Do you have show hidden files and folders enabled in your folder view? If not you are not going to see any uninstall information or other hidden stuff. You will also not see the pagefile.

 

I have show hidden files enabled. I am factoring in the size of the page file to my estimates as well....

Steve

 

Is the Windows swap file included in the disk usage?

 

remember a VM is all smoke and mirrors

my VM "thinks" it has 32 gb with 22 gb in use
but on the Mac OS that does not exists because the data is spread over the parallels file system

the trick with macs is to use the GUI and get on with some work
leave the hacks to a developer

10 years ago when a lot of Ram was 4 mb
(Macs shipped with 2 mb - and still work today)
we all used the Mac "get Info" to manage the RAM manually

most of us have 2gb + on newer machines
and it is best to avoid fiddling wth the details if it all works as you wish

over customising is big tieme waster
I ran out of disk space
so I got a 300 gb LA Cie fast firewire disk from the Apple store on my cerdit card

copied my whole Macintosh HD onto it by drag and drop
and two hours later I started deleting all the stuff on the Laptop that i never use (mostly old Parallels clones from the beta tests)

I refused to learn DOS
and got a Mac after the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

Hugh W

 

Latest follow-up (and still a problem).

Right-click on the "C" drive, select Properties:
- Used: 13.3Gb
- Free: 6.21Gb

Open "C" drive, turn on "show hidden files and folders", select all, right-click->Properties
- 6.23Gb used
- 26,198 files, 2129 folders

Run "chkdsk -f" and on reboot
- 13,820,164 used in
- 41,483 files

So... It appears that "C" properties are correct (they agree with what chkdsk returns), but where are these other ~14,000 files hidden??? And how do I get rid of them? I could really use the 9Gb for my Aperture library....

TIA for any tips or hints that will help me solve this problem.

Steve

 

On my Dell Latitude 820 at work:

Right-click on the "C" drive, select Properties:
- Used: 37.7Gb
- Free: 36.7Gb

Open "C" drive, turn on "show hidden files and folders", select all, right-click->Properties
- 34.7Gb used
- 71,535 files, 6,789 folders

Run "chkdsk -f" and on reboot
- 42,501,514,240 used in
- 112,868 files


So now that we have proven Microsoft Windows has no idea what is going on with its disks (or at least its tools cannot agree on usage), what do you want Parallels to do about it? You need to remember, Windows (XP included) has tools from a number of older OSes in it. I honestly have no idea which one is correct, I have no idea why there are differences. I assume some are remnants from the old DOS days, perhaps one of the units of measure does not properly account for NTFS block size vs. FAT 32 block size. Whatever is causing the discrepancy though, you need to take this up with Microsoft as it is *their* tools which are producing the confusing information.

 

Wingdo,

Thanks for the information. While your numbers show a few percentage points of discrepancy, mine are showing over 100%...

Something else that's interesting on this Parallels disk. I did a "find" of all files (hidden and system included) who's size was bigger than 10Mb (10,000kb). In MANY cases (80%), the system found two of each file in the same directory. If I open two windows by using "Open Containing Folder), and touch a file in one, it appears in the other.

So... now I'm suspecting that I have a file allocation table corruption that's got duplicate entries for the same file. I'm going to go grab disk utils and run them against my Hard Drive. I really don't want to install Norton SystemBloat (whoops, I mean SystemWorks) on this machine, though. Any recommendations for an equivalent, lean, no frills disk analyzer?

Thanks again for the information. I do know about the horrible "mix" of new and outdated utilities, and the difference between NTFS and FAT blocks. Give me a Linux/Unix based OS any day (not that there aren't some problems there too...)

Steve

 

Actually Steve, while our percentages are off considerably, the actual amount of disk space variance is almost exactly the same. I've got an 8GB variance between the lowest and highest reporting numbers. Are you using NTFS or FAT32 on your disk?

 

Wingdo,

I noticed that similarity in sizing too. I'm using NTFS under XP.

I ran similary "queries" (chkdsk, disk and file props) on W2K VM machine and a Vista VM, and they don't show this LARGE difference (they differ by a couple hundred Mb).

I may just rebuild this XP machine from scratch to see if that will solve the problem.

Steve

 

Still an issue with 3.0 b4128

FWIW, this is still an issue with 3.0 Build 4128. Seems to only affect XP machines. And my drive has increased to requiring over 14 GB to hold only 6Gb of data.

I've learned not to run the compressor any more until it's "fixed" too. What used to take about 30 minutes, now takes over 5 hours to run...

Guess that's what I get for installing a new version and not waiting for it to be debugged by the user community. Next time I'll wait a few months before upgrading, which might give the developers enough time to fix the things that are broken in the new release.

Steve