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Unknown space on storage drive

EDVurd

Hi all,

 

So i have 2 identical hard drives I use as storage and keep them synced together. Windows (10), WinDirStat and TreeSize all show the exact same number of files and folders, but one of the drives shows 5.2gb less free space in Windows explorer. WinDirStat shows this as simply an "Unknown." I know how to look for hidden files and this is not a system file as far as I can tell. Does anyone have any suggestions as to how to figure out what this "unknown" 5gb is? Thanks!

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Use a different OS that can identify multiple file system types.  It’s about the right size for a small Unix partition for example.  Windows is sort of famous for pretending any file system that wasn’t invented by Microsoft doesn’t exist

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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Thanks for the quick reply. Disk management shows no discrepancies in terms of partitions and I have not changed anything that I know of. This seemed to have just happened in the last day.

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Ew.  That’s potentially bad.  You can fit a whole OS and several apps in a Unix partition that size.  What OS are you using?

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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Also there is stuff older than Unix that is even more compact.  What Unix mostly did was get rid of flat files.  A flat file OS can be unbelievably tiny.  Palm pilots used to run one.  We’re talking kilobytes not megabytes here.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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Yet another thought: is it assigned a negative address?

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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6 minutes ago, EDVurd said:

Windows 10, as stated originally.

Yeah.  Someone may possibly have dropped a unix partition on your drive.  Unix has a whole bunch of different file systems the oldest being called fs. It was designed for magnetic tape.  I’m tempted to get you to boot some sort of BSD live cd and see if that is can identify it.  I’ve been out of things for a very very long time, and I was never really in them to begin with.  I’m choosing BSD because there are flavors of it  that are big on backward compatibility and can often read old file systems no one bothers to use anymore.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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4 minutes ago, EDVurd said:

What do you mean by that?

if it’s got a negative address someone is hiding something.

 

There’s a classic old trick: addressed start at zero and go up, but hard drives use a system designed long ago for something called “drum memory” that was basically a crappy hard drive shaped like a tube.  What they did with hard drives is turn the tube into a cone and then flatten it into a platter, but the system is the same.  As a result if you give a partition a negative address a lot of systems can’t find it even though it’s there.  If you know to look for it though, poof there it is.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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I don’t want to killitwithfire though because there’s also a pretty good chance that it’s just stuff the hard drive itself uses for housekeeping and if you wipe it you could brick your drive.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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Urgh.  No replies.  Now I’m scared the OP went off and burned his hard drive housekeeping and he can’t even see the internet to reply now.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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Lol no no all good. Are you suggesting someone hacked in to store something there?

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1 minute ago, EDVurd said:

Lol no no all good. Are you suggesting someone hacked in to store something there?

Did it Personally? No.  Malware could work that way though.  It occurred to me Housekeeping stuff could look real different on different drives if they were different brands.   Just because your files are identical doesn’t mean the drives actually are even if they’re the same make.  I was assuming that only one meant there was an anomaly. It might not be.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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I can give a BSD or linux a try through a VM I suppose. Any preference of distribution? What should I really be looking for when I get in there?

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There is netNSD and freeBSD, and a couple of others, one of which is actually OSX.  plus probably several forks of each. One of em, either  free or net specializes in security stuff and the other specializes in backwards compatibility stuff.  The backwards compatibility one is the one you want.  It will run on systems so old Linux won’t touch em.  There will be a lot of file system types.  There will be a program to run to analyze the disk.

 

 IF it recognizes a file system there there might be something. If it doesn’t it’s almost certainly some drive housekeeping flat file.  Or of course it could mean some clever one has written his own file system.  Paranoia is annoying.

 

theres probably an easier way to this.  I suspect this is the kind of thing antimalware programs look for.  Sadly I predate antimalware software.

Not a pro, not even very good.  I’m just old and have time currently.  Assuming I know a lot about computers can be a mistake.

 

Life is like a bowl of chocolates: there are all these little crinkly paper cups everywhere.

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