Salem

I'm unsure if anyone on this forum is tech savvy but here goes my plee, I'm having some issues with my current hard drive (well my primary) after transferring litterally 300gb of games/music/movies ect to external hdd I've noticed that there is about 70+ gb worth of memory still "missing"

I've gone through mulitple procedures to "clean, removed, ect" and I've finally decided to just do a reformat.

my question is if there is an easier procedure to reformatting my internal hdd without having to reinstall my windows 7, which is always a pain in the ass.

does anyone know of a way of wiping all info other than the OS

I know this is a bit random but any and all help would be appreciated

Have you tried disk defragmentation?
If not, you should. On Win7 it's Start -> type defrag in search bar -> select your drive -> and wait till it's done.

EDIT: Might I also suggest a good friend of mine - CCleaner. Or any similar program you find that has functions to easily wipe cache/history/temp files/cookies, uninstallation, registry cleaning and - drive wiper.

Is this a laptop or a desktop? Many latops have hidden recovery partition (lenovo for example).

Also, how do you know 70gb is missing? Size of all partitions summed is less than your HDD's capacity, or partition has some unfree space even though there is nothing on it?
You do have display of hidden folders enabled, right?

Well, if you have Dell and have the "Dell DataSafe Local Backup-('some' Edition) (Maybe you should give more info), then you can use that to restore your computer to factory setup, which is reversible.

Or try this.

There's several factors figuring into the amount of space available on a HDD after partitioning and formating.

1. Size of and number of partitions. A single partition still eats up some of the space for volume information. (Numbers available out there somewhere....)

2. Cluster size--smaller clusters means optimized storage for amount of data stored, but requires a larger file table and slows access time. Larger clusters means faster access and a smaller file table, but you're losing space to empty bits in a cluster if it's not completely filled. (Compression programs deal with this, but of course increase access and read/write times.)

3. Often times external drives come with extras that can often be safely deleted or configurations that are less than optimal.

When moving mass data like this, I prefer to use mirroring software. These will gather up all those hidden partitions and such (as said about the hidden backup partitions--these often hold the OS and any pre-installed software). Partition Magic used to be my favorite drive utility, but it's been years since I've needed anything like it and no idea what the state of the program or other such utilities is.

A bit of an update after disk cleaning defraging I now have recovered 12 gig I'm trying now to place my pagefile.sys into an external drive to alleviate the burden on my poor primary internal that is only 80gig (total size) I recieved an error after restarting and then one of my hard stopped working.

I would recommend keeping your page file on an internal drive. It's generally slower and will hinder overall performance.

Try running scandisk. You will need to reboot for the drive you have your operating system installed on. If there's any errors in files, the allocation table, or other file related functions stored on the drive, it should find them.

Also, keep this in mind- when a manufacturer sells you a hard drive, and calls it, say, a 500GB hard drive, it is not going to say 500 GB in "My Computer". It's going to display something around 488GB. Hard drives are in units of 1000, unlike RAM, which is in units of 1024. My 1TB drive, for example, is 931GB in size.

imrielle wrote:Also, keep this in mind- when a manufacturer sells you a hard drive, and calls it, say, a 500GB hard drive, it is not going to say 500 GB in "My Computer". It's going to display something around 488GB. Hard drives are in units of 1000, unlike RAM, which is in units of 1024. My 1TB drive, for example, is 931GB in size.

This i know lol

I've decided to just bite the bullet and purchase a new hard drive its a pain do my OS again :/ but after ASL my effort I'm still missing 44gig