Today I did a thorough scandisk, and after it finished I had 1.32Gb less space on my harddrive!! I have only got a pathetic 9.3Gb, so i would like to know what happened, and is there anyway I can get it back? I havn't yet defragmented. Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank you.

Now i think about it i have just remembered that when i started scan disc, that it said that i had so many bytes (equated to about 200mb) stored in different clusters - or something like this. Anyhow it asked if i wanted to get rid of them, turn them into files or ignore them, i thought i choose ignore, but i may have choosen change them to files. Could this be where some of my space has gone. I did a disk clean up and it got rid of some of the files associated with the scan disk and it has given me back .17 of a gig - woopy. Actually the size of those files was the same roughly if i can remember rightly as the size of the bytes stored in clusters. So where is the rest of it gone. Also when i did the scan disk and it asked me what i wanted to do with the clusters or whatever the term is what should i have done. I wanted to delete them, but it said that they may be needed and i was unsure.

If Scandisk finds lost clusters, it is usually useless to convert them to files, and it usually does no harm if you let Scandisk let the space the lost clusters occupy be marked and available as free space. If you ignore the lost clusters, Scandisk will mark those areas as unusable, and subtract them from your available hard drive capacity. You can also lose space if Scandisk finds file allocation errors and you don't fix that, or it it finds bad sectors and they are marked as unusable, or if the size of the drive was being incorrectly reported and Scandisk makes a correction to the drive size making it it's true size - and that was smaller. You can't do anything to recover space lost because of the latter two - the second is to protect your data from corruption, the third is to correct an incorrect detection of the drive size. Still, 1.32 gb is a lot of difference. Are you sure those are both Scandisk figures? Hard drive manufacturers quote the size of their drives in million bytes, not megabytes as Windows, and probably your bios, does, and megabytes are larger (1,024 X 1,024 bytes per megabyte, or 1,024 X 1,024 X 1,024 per gigabyte), plus Format uses up a percentage of the space, so a manufacturers size of 9.3GB (9.3 x 1000 x 1 million btyes) will be somewhat smaller in Windows, and to Scandisk.

Hi thank you Mike for answering, at least now i can understand maybe what happened. As for the space difference, the 1.3 gig difference was not scandisk figures, I mean that this was not mentioned during scandisk at all. I noticed it when checking the free space after the scandisk. I noted the free space before i did the scandisk and checked again after it was finished. Before i had 7.28Gb free and after i had 5.96Gb free The amount of bytes told to me by scandisk that was in clusters was roughly 231,000,000. Which I equated to 231Mb, asuming that there are 1000bytes in a Kb, which i have always thought. Even if my calcuations are not right, this does not even wildly add up to 1.3 Gigs.

".....asuming that there are 1000bytes in a Kb, ....." 1000 is not binary. 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte, in Windows, probably in your bios. It's a power of 2 - 2 to the tenth power. Data uses the binary numbering system - each bit is on (1) or off (0), a byte is 8 bits, 2 to the third power. 1,024 X 1,024 bytes per kilobyte = 1 megabyte, or 1,048,576 bytes - 2 to the twentieth power 1,024 X 1,024 bytes per kilobyte X 1,024 kilobytes per megabyte = 1 gigabyte, or 1,073,741,824 bytes - 2 to the thirtieth power Other examples: "16 bit" color has 65,536 possible colors - 64 kilobits "32 bit" color has 67,108,864 possible colors - 64 megabits

Well i didnt know any of that, interesting, i always thought for some reason that, 1000 bytes = 1Kb 1000 Kb = 1Mb 1000 Mb =1Gb Right so thanks!!! :)