Freeing Up Disk Space

[slabay]

Instead of an EDR, try a quick repair first. This may do the trick. Remember though that the quick isn't so quick, and let it finish up.

John

LOL, I know there's nothing quick about any of the repair stuff. Like I said, I've really been using TS12, and I haven't really been using it for more than taking screenshots lately, since most of what I've been doing has been reskins and I'm getting started with 3ds Max too. Usually what I do is start it when I get home from work and go to bed, and it has worked its magic by the time I wake up.

 

[JCitron]

Checkdisk is a utility that you use if your having hardrive issues... If the data is actually bad, then yes, Chkdsk will delete it.. chkdsk will also repair the hardrive or let you know if its dead or windows is dead (Yep, learned this lesson...) Now Defrag is different... Defrag moves out of place files to where they should be.. It will not give you any more HDD space, but it will allow the computer to run a lot smoother as windows and the computer does not have to search far and wide to find files... It can go to the place where they should be and TA-DA they are right there~

That's a pretty good explanation.

Chkdsk doesn't always delete the data; it moves it to weirdly-named folders that have a bunch of numbers in them. The data is there, but it's still hard to figure out for us. If they were documents, it would be easy, but for Hash folders in the User Data folder, this is almost impossible for us to do. The only time it deletes the data is when all of the parts can't be found. These used to be called lost clusters in older Windows and MS-DOS. Sometimes the data recovery process isn't as nice as it should be. This is why having backups is a good thing.

A better example of a fragmented drive is like having a deck of cards that has been shuffled. The defragmenting process takes all of the data that's connected to a file, like all the Aces, all the Jack, and all the Kings, together. By doing this it makes reading the data faster just as it would to find all the Aces only if you were asked to get them.

John