Folder is bigger than HDD capacity????

[lembi2001]

Ok....

I just noticed something VERY weird with the reported size of a folder on my Hard Drive. I realize that the Size on Disk will differ from the Actual Size of the folder due to the way that sectors and blocks are handled what i don't get is how the Size of the folder is almost 200GB BIGGER than the max capacity of my Hard Drive:

Image 1 shows the folder properties and i have highlighted the size's

image 2 shows my Hard Drives Total Size again these have been highlighted to show that something very odd is going on:

can someone please explain this to me???

 

[kamel5547]

Compressed folders. The size on disk reflects the space being used by those files. The size referes to the uncompressed file size.

 

[lembi2001]

as far as i was aware i hadn't enabled compressed folders or is this somthing that windows 7 does automatically???

 

[darkguset]

What sort of files have you got in there?

 

[lembi2001]

iso files. most are standard 4.7 GB isos the odd one or two are dual layer isos. my org wants a backup of all the Discs we have just in case anything goes screwy with the ones we have.

 

[darkguset]

Click Start, click Run, type cmd, and then click OK.
At the command prompt, type the following command:
chkdsk d:
where d: is the letter of the drive that you want to check.
Click OK.

That will show the cluster size as well as other wealth of information. Have a look and paste the results in here as well so we can have a look.

 

[lembi2001]

Ok here you are:

[fixed]732572000 KB total disk space.
684770580 KB in 25075 files.
11796 KB in 2062 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
198784 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
47590840 KB available on disk.

4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
183143000 total allocation units on disk.
11897710 allocation units available on disk.[/fixed]

 

[Ijack]

Click on the "Advanced" button in the properties window. That will show you whether the folder is compressed or not. From what you've said, it really has to be. Compressed folders and files should show in blue in Explorer.

 

[lembi2001]

The drive and/or folder is Definitely not compressed. it's not bothering me too much, i was just curious as to why it was being reported at that size.

 

[plasmastorm]

If it is not compressed then most likely the file attributes are corrupted.
Only way I have found to fix this on my own machine when it happened (few years ago under win xp 64bit) was to backup everything I wanted to keep and then format the drive entirely as the file itself could not even be deleted.

 

[Ijack]

What application created the files in that folder? I's just possible that the answer lies in sparse files.

 

[darkguset]

Are there any subfolders in that folder? In case of Windows folder for example, my Windows folder is not compressed, but if you do a properties search the same thing shows up as yours. But if i go into the Windows folder, there are several compressed folders in there (usually updates and service packs) that make for that amount of difference. Try looking into your folder for something compressed and not the folder itself as it will not show up any compressed files inside.

 

[welshmousepk]

big pr0n folder you have there.

thats not too abnormal though. just a difference between compressed and actual reported sizes.

 

[lembi2001]

thanks for all your help, i will look at the individual files and see if any of them are compressed. there are no subfolders in there and they were all created with an iso recording tool such as magic iso.

Cheers

 

[Ijack]

all created with an iso recording tool such as magic iso.
Cheers

My guess is that your iso tool is using sparse files. Would make sense as such files are often large and highly redundant.

The only way that I know (other than programmatically) to determine whether a file is sparse or not is to use the "compact" command as detailed here.

 

[ixion]

Try running a scandisk on the volume, I've seen this before where something has become corrupted after it has fixed things the file sizes displayed normally.

 

[darkguset]

Hmm.. that Magic ISO could be to blame. It could be creating some temporary files or compressed temp folders and hide them from the OS. ijack is probably right.