45 gigs of hard drive space vanished.

[Graphic]

This was a 500 gig hard drive last night.  I was testing my RAM one gig at a time and after the first time I started up the computer with one stick (1 GB) of RAM, 45 gigs of my hard drive was gone.  I now have all my RAM back in (3 x 1 GB) and it's still gone.  I tried this and this...the first wasn't applicable and the second didn't do anything except free up extra space, but my HDD remained at 465 gigs. 

I'm stumped, can anyone help?

[Allan]

System Restore is a likely culprit. And the system reserves 12% of the drive for future MFT expansion. You can download Treesize Personal and see where the usage is: http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_personal/

[patio]

Indexing will gobble some of that up as well.

[Graphic]

Are you sure?  This happened literally between one restart, and I've had system restore enabled forever.  And it doesn't just use up some hard drive space, it will take some and make it appear to not exist anymore?  I've never experienced that with system restore before.  I'm not saying that something suddenly took up 45 gigs of space, I'm saying 45 gigs of space ceased to exist - that's supposed to say "500 GB" and it did 12 hours ago.

[patio]

Chart Courtesy of Western Digital...

Nothing Vanished.

[Graphic]

Any idea why it would suddenly change the way it calculates size after doing it the other way for 2 1/2 years?

[s-mac]

This confuses me..My first thought is, it's a 500GB hard drive, which would give you around 465GB. To my knowledge there hasn't been any 550GB HDD's made..(which would give you 500GB HDD space.

It's possible some 3rd party program was installed that displayed the drice in decimal instead of binary..if anything would do that.

Maybe someone else has been using your computer and messing with stuff?

If you take a look inside, the hard drive will say how big it is..if it's a 500GB, then you'll get 465GB. I know, I hate the fact manufacturers do this too.