The Full/Empty Recycle Bin
I'm trying to clear up some space for the purpose of video editing on my Windows XP Pro machine. The E: drive is my chosen partition for this job, as it has nothing on it except for the raw capture. One problem I was running into was a slight problem of missing 2.4 GB. On a partition that is 24.5 GB, 2.4 GB is a lot of missing real estate. So I made sure that everything was cleared off (except for the raw video), and I mean everything. All the other files were moved to different partitions, the recycle bin was emptied and the system restore points were cleared. Still I'm missing some space. So I ran scandisk and defrag, hoping that would clear up 2.4 GB (a miraculous feat) on this FAT32 partition (I chose FAT32 when installing XP for Linux compatibility reasons). This did not clear up the space, so I converted it to NTFS. I then went directory diving in cmd.exe, deleted a small file from the recycle bin that wasn't showing up in explorer, but that still doesn't get me back my 2.4 GB. Check out the following photo:
Windows Stupidity. Please excuse any Flickr problems, you will need to view the larger size to read the text.
In this photo, on the top left, you can see that the recycle bin is empty, according to the cmd.exe shell command dir. In the bottom left is explorer.exe showing that the recycle bin is empty. On the bottom right we see my explorer settings to show that I am viewing all hidden and system files (I leave my settings like this all the time). Finally, in the top right, we see that the recycle bin is taking up 2.4 GB out of spite for its master. A comparison of the raw video folder with the total partition usage will confirm the 2.4 GB deficit. I know many people wonder why I use Linux, and maybe it's things like this that caused me to switch; Linux just doesn't screw with my head in such evil ways.
Does anybody know any other ways I can get back my hard drive space? I don't want to have to format (raw video is on there, and not enough space on other partitions), but perhaps there are other sneaky things that Windows is doing I don't know about?
1 comment:
Right-click on the Recycle Bin, choose "Properties", and lower the "Maximum size" slider. It defaults to 10% of the drive.
To be fair, in Win95 days, hard drives were small enough that 10% of the drive wouldn't have been such a large amount (though it's still proportionally pretty large).
Post a Comment