Local It advice sought

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ALIB
Posts: 1553
Joined: 12 Oct 2006 21:34
Location: East Sussex

Local It advice sought

Post by ALIB »

From your local IT numpty.

I have a 600GB hard drive i use to back-up data from my laptop. At the moment the drive is full, but when i check the inventory to see what is on the hard drive, it only has about 4GB of stuff at the most. Why is the drive full ?

Pointers can possibly assist on the STF boards/pm's.

However, if someone wants to take a look sometime and sort it, then I'll gladly donate a bottle of wine/similar
I'm at the Kirkdale end of Dartmouth Rd by the Bricklayers Arms. Time /date to suit, not hugely urgent, but pending

pm or post is good for me.
Wing
Posts: 141
Joined: 9 Oct 2006 15:11
Location: Sydenham Hill

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by Wing »

I assume the hard drive in question is an external hard drive. Is it formatted using NTFS ?
The Eagle
Posts: 314
Joined: 18 Feb 2006 06:19
Location: Sydenham

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by The Eagle »

Are you looking at the correct drive?

Most PC's/Laptops bought these days have a partitioned drive (usually D) this are usually hidden files that are used to reset your PC/Laptop back to factory settings. They are about 4GB.
NEMO
Posts: 14
Joined: 17 Jun 2007 11:03
Location: FAIRLAWN PARK

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by NEMO »

I use external hard drives connected to Macs to store and transfer image between computers.
It may be different for PCs

If you drag a file to the trash, you have to empty the trash while the drive is still connected. If you don't the file will disappear from the file list but not from the memory. I think your drive is full of invisible files.

Try emptying the trash folder with the drive connected, if that doesn't work save your files and reformat the external drive.

This also true for SD cards.You have to delete the file on the device that created it or you can't be sure it's gone.

I hope that helps.
ALIB
Posts: 1553
Joined: 12 Oct 2006 21:34
Location: East Sussex

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by ALIB »

Thanks everyone. It is an external 600GB drive connected by USB.

I think Nemo has got closest and I'll give that a try.
ALIB
Posts: 1553
Joined: 12 Oct 2006 21:34
Location: East Sussex

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by ALIB »

Does anyone have a spare keyboard with a USB connection they want to offload for cash/bottle of wine ?
my keyboard unforunately came into contact with the contents of a bottle of wine last night
Sydenham
Posts: 320
Joined: 2 Sep 2007 09:08
Location: Wells Park

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by Sydenham »

PM sent about this.
JRobinson
Posts: 1104
Joined: 5 Jan 2010 12:40
Location: De Frene Rd

Re: Local It advice sought

Post by JRobinson »

most niggly IT/PC issues can be resolved quite easily with some data/disk clean up.

I'm not connected to this, just a satisfied customer, but I'd recommend CCleaner - in it's standard setup, it cleans all the crap off your computer, it'll find registry errors, empty the recycle bin, wipe any free space, get rid of unwanted temporary files etc which cause a waste of resource.

also it's worth doing a disk clean up, and a defragmentation if needed.

and after several years, the operating system (Windows NT, XP, 95, 7, etc) gets very 'splodgy' and it's worth saving/back up everything important somewhere safe off PC, reformat and re install the OS, and then re-install only what you need, will speed the whole thing up no end!
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