Hi, my hard drive is reporting the wrong amount of free space. I've unhidden files and selected everything and I should have around 2GB free. I even tried "dir /s" and "dir /ah /s" and the same result, I should have a good 2GB free yet I only have 450MB free. Even if I delete very large files the same amount of free space is detected. Thanks for any help.

There can be a number of reasons for this. First of all, any files in the recycle bin are still written to the drive and that space isn't available. Next, windows creats a swap file that can be quite large. A swap file is usually advantageous. Next harddrives sizes are reported on the packaging wrong. Check in storage management to see the formatted capacity of the drive. In your case I would suspect the recycle bin is the issue.

I've already checked the Recycle Bin, the swap file is on the C: drive. This problem is occuring on the E: partition. I should have specified in the original message. Hard drives capacities are reported incorrectly mostly due to the manufacturer's use of the 1000KB per MB rather than the actual 1024KB per MB.

Use search for *.* on the e: drive. Click on the size tab so it sorts from largest file to smallest. See if you can't find where the disk space is going.

The problem fixed itself, I filled up the the "450MB" and magically the space appeared once the drive was "full".