Computer question - harddisk
 

Fella's,
Just completed a fresh install of W2K on a P3 Dell Latitude C600 with a 10GB harddisk (no other software). According to 'Properties', used space on the harddisk is now 8GB :eek:, just 2GB free space remaining.

Does anyone have an idea what happened, what could be wrong ??
W2K installed should take no more than 500MB max, don't you think ??

Thanks,
V.

You've just installed Windows 2000?

(Why not use something more suited to your hardware like LINUX?)

Anyway as a guide I'd expect it to be smaller than Windows XP => I've got Windows XP as a virtual machine and that file is about 2GB and I've got more than just an operating system there.

BUT

How many of the service packs have you installed?

Have you removed the back up folders yet?

WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

Use this to map out the drive to see what is taking up all the space

Formatted a 10GB drive is going to be about 9.6ish tops.....Win2k is not that small, I'd imagine with service pack 4 its going to be several GB fully up and running even with a clean install. And, WHY are you runing an antique system like win2k? Why not even XP? Better yet, use Linux like was recommended. Ubuntu 11 can install with less than 2.5GB used in a basic install.....and has a very small ram footprint.

In this modern world that PC running an old form of windows is just about useless.

Who knows? For basic document editing and web browsing -- think Email and Wikipedia -- W2k works just fine. But yeah ... Linux is much better.

There's also quite a lot of proprietary software that may run on W2k and not on later versions. Windows NT is actually still in use in 2011 as well...

MTA vs. Windows NT | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Thank you, thank you! I've been looking a long time for something like this... even our support guys didn't have anything like this (pathetic).

Believe me: I've tried almost all Linux distro's around, and all worked VVVVERRYYY SLOOOOOOWWW on this Dell P3. Only exceptions are Puppy and DSL, real fast, but not as straightforward, reliable and robust as W2K, while XP is way to bloated/heavy. Seems Linux is not designed/engineered for old PC tech.

I managed to take out some 1,5GB of redundant stuff, but 6-7GB for WK2 still seems outrageous.
I'll give 'jubjub's application a try.

Best,
V.

Run a chkdsk and see if that fixes it.

Am I the only one amused that someone referred to the hard drive as a hard disk? The last had disk I had was back in the late 1980's...It was the largest one we could get at the time at 50meg.

Not really. HDD. Hard Disk Drive

Update: I installed the same W2K on an Class 10 SD card with IDE adapter, and it now only takes 1GB. Most likely, the HD of the first install is bad.

Best Regards,
V.

Did you try using WinDirStat? I love that utility!

-J

Or, what seems to me more likely, you had hidden sectors or partitions already on the drive.

Win2K is pretty old technology, so run FDISK on the drive first, wipe out any partitions/sectors, then create a single active partition and format it for NTFS (since you're going to be running an NT-based OS).

Good luck.

Yes, and indeed discovered some 1,5GB redundant stuff.
Nice tool !