Someone explane this, 69mb used up after formatting?

Phil2008 · 10 Apr 2006 at 14:37

I made 2 partitions on 1 hard drive, a 20gb for windows and apps, and a 170gb for games, music and stuff. Anyway when you install windows you can only format the partition you want windows to be installed on. So I formatted the 170gb partition in windows. when it had finished formatting I looked at it, and it said 69mb used,,, why is this? heres a pic

semi-pro waster · 10 Apr 2006 at 18:14

It has been a very long time since I've had a clean hard drive but presumably file system overheads will take up some of that space. Maybe someone else could confirm or correct me

toString · 10 Apr 2006 at 21:24

Yep.

Same reason a 2mb floppy is 1.44mb.

basmic · 10 Apr 2006 at 21:27

KingAdora said:
Yep.

Same reason a 2mb floppy is 1.44mb.

Actually a 1.44mb floppy is 1.38mb formatted.

Anyway, untick Indexing Services, and see what happens.

toString · 10 Apr 2006 at 21:29

Oh yeah, good point!

Phil2008 · 10 Apr 2006 at 22:46

So thats perfectly mormal, no need to wrorry about it?

squiffy · 10 Apr 2006 at 23:17

I think for the MFT. If you use OO Defrag you'll see a considerble amount of yellow squares (MFT) even for a blank HD.

Talking of which, is there a utility which'll clear MFT of deleted files? I want to remove traces of files such as "bigbottomedgirls.txt"

Phil2008 · 10 Apr 2006 at 23:51

It took over a hour to format. Someone has a 200gb external drive, and he says it only takes about 30mins :confused:

james.miller · 10 Apr 2006 at 23:54

low level format speeds seem to vary wildly from drive to drive, at least in my experiance. But regardless, you should never have to resort to a low level format unless your stupidly over-paranoid about data that was on the drive previously. Even then, you dont have an excuse unless you wear a tin-foil hat.....

a quick format however, will take just a few seconds.

Anyway, that used space may also be either files in the recycle bin on that drive, or maybe a restore point that's been stored on there in the hidden 'system volume information' folder.

Skilldibop · 12 Apr 2006 at 11:34

Windows Isn't vaguely accurate in the sense of HD space anyway, there's also capacity writen off for pagefile space and wotnot that windows sometimes ignores.

Dutch Guy · 14 Apr 2006 at 12:01

I think it is reserved space for the MFT.

MagicBoy · 14 Apr 2006 at 15:10

Dutch Guy said:
I think it is reserved space for the MFT.

Aye. There's two copies of the MFT + transaction logfiles etc. Do a google search on NTFS system files and I'm sure it'll turn up some more information.