Determining available hard drive space
Issue
Determining available hard drive space.
Solution
To determine the available hard drive space will vary depending upon the operating system that is currently being used. Below is a listing of various operating systems and the methods of determining how much space is available in that operating system.
Windows Vista and 7 users
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users
MS-DOS
and Windows command line users
Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users
Linux and Unix users
- Open the Computer Icon. In Computer you'll see each drive with a small percentage bar of how much disk space is being used as well as a description of how much is free and the total disk space. If you're wanting additional information right-click the drive and click Properties. Below is an example of what this looks like.
Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users
- From the Windows desktop open My Computer
- Within My Computer highlight and right-click the C: Drive or the drive you wish to determine the capacity or available space on the drive.
- From the menu that appears after right-clicking the drive click Properties.
- The Properties window will display the used space, free space, and the total capacity of the hard drive or other drive similar to what is shown below.
Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows XP users:
If you're running Windows 2000 or higher My Computer will also display the Total Size and Free Space for each of the drives in the main My Computer Windows. If you wish to display more information as well as a graph of available space follow the above steps.
In addition to the steps listed above you can also still view the available space through MS-DOS.
MS-DOS and Windows command line users
Open the MS-DOS prompt.
To determine the available space on a hard drive using MS-DOS we recommend that the 'dir' command be used.
At the MS-DOS prompt type:
dir <press enter>
At the end of the directory listing you will see information similar to the below example.
2 file (s) 578 bytes
15 dir (s) 16,754.78 MB free
As you can see above the hard drive has over 16GB of free space. If you wish to see all files and how much space they are occupying type the below commands.
cd\
dir /s
The above command will list all files on your computer (except the hidden files) and give you the total amount of disk space they utilize as well as the free disk space.
- See the dir command and cd command pages for further information about each of these commands.
In Windows 3.x or Windows NT 3.x you can determine the available free space by highlighting the C: drive and on the status bar at the bottom of the screen see the available free space and total.
In addition to the steps listed above you can also still view the available space through MS-DOS.
Additional information
- Regaining computer hard drive space.
- How do I determine the size of a file?
- How do I determine how much space my floppy disk has?