How do I determine how much space my floppy disk has?

Question

How do I determine how much space my floppy disk has?

Answer

Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users
MS-DOS users and Windows 3.x and NT 3.x users
Linux and Unix users

Windows 95, 98, NT 4.x, 2000, ME, and XP users

  1. From the Windows desktop open My Computer
  2. Within My Computer highlight and right-click the 3 1/2 Floppy (A:) Drive.
  3. From the menu that appears after right-clicking the drive click Properties.
  4. The Properties window will display the used space, free space, and the total capacity of the drive, similar to what is shown below.

Windows volume properties

In addition to the steps listed above you can also still view the available space through MS-DOS

MS-DOS users and Windows 3.x and NT 3.x 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.

Linux and Unix users

Additional information