For those of you building a LARGE partition for your music collection, I just ran into something that was perplexing to say the least.
I took a spare 120GB drive and added it to my system as a 2nd drive setup as an F: partition formatted Primary and NTFS.
Everything was just fine. Then I started putting my 25MB average ripped songs on it. I got up to about 8GB of music but something odd happened. The folder I stored the music in clearly showed only 8GB of data but the properties for the partition showed 22GB of data being used. I kept wondering where 14GB went. I looked around. Nothing on the drive.... Grrr.
I got annoyed, moved the data off F and onto my D partition. Reformatted F and all was fine again. Started ripping more music. Got to 21GB this time when F came back saying it was using 33GB. Now 12GB was missing. Reformatted again. Again, put back all the files and everything was fine.
Started wondering what was up. I posted the experience to several storage-related forums. No one had any ideas. Posted to several newsgroups. Finally two people on one wrote back that they thought they knew what it was.
Turns out they were right. I had Windows XP's System Restore feature set to the default setting which is turned on (monitoring) and by default it takes UP TO 12% of your disk space to create System Restore space. In my case that worked out to 14GB. In the first case it used all of it and in the second it used most of it. It kept doing this apparently because of the single large files I kept hitting the drive with. I've now turned off System Restore, put on my Helmet of Shame for the day and now all seems fine again. I can't imagine that I'd need any sort of System Restore data for a partition housing only music files so I should be just fine without losing a nice feature (System Restore has now saved me twice in 2 years).
So, just in case anyone else runs into this, now you know.
Full Version: Beware XP System Restore Feature
That's why I always turn System Restore off and use Powerquest Drive Image after everything is set up ...
System restore only stores .exe files , registeries and dll's
it will not store anyhting outside Documents and settings folder!
weird, do you set F: as your "my document" folder?
But i've disabled system restore!
system restore can't repair serious errors
it will not store anyhting outside Documents and settings folder!
weird, do you set F: as your "my document" folder?
But i've disabled system restore!
system restore can't repair serious errors
While we're at it, beware of WinXP + SP1 with hard drives >137 Gb. If you don't use automatic Windows updates, check this link. I bought two 200 Gb last month and lost a lot of data because of this critical bug.
It's not set as anything but a virtually desolate partition.
Can XP set it as that partition? Whatever it was I find it very telling that it was taking exactly the amount of space that System Restore had set as the reserve.
Can XP set it as that partition? Whatever it was I find it very telling that it was taking exactly the amount of space that System Restore had set as the reserve.
QUOTE(Agrajag @ Nov 6 2003, 01:18 AM)
For those of you building a LARGE partition for your music collection, I just ran into something that was perplexing to say the least.
I took a spare 120GB drive and added it to my system as a 2nd drive setup as an F: partition formatted Primary and NTFS.
Everything was just fine. Then I started putting my 25MB average ripped songs on it. I got up to about 8GB of music but something odd happened. The folder I stored the music in clearly showed only 8GB of data but the properties for the partition showed 22GB of data being used. I kept wondering where 14GB went. I looked around. Nothing on the drive.... Grrr.
I got annoyed, moved the data off F and onto my D partition. Reformatted F and all was fine again. Started ripping more music. Got to 21GB this time when F came back saying it was using 33GB. Now 12GB was missing. Reformatted again. Again, put back all the files and everything was fine.
Started wondering what was up. I posted the experience to several storage-related forums. No one had any ideas. Posted to several newsgroups. Finally two people on one wrote back that they thought they knew what it was.
Turns out they were right. I had Windows XP's System Restore feature set to the default setting which is turned on (monitoring) and by default it takes UP TO 12% of your disk space to create System Restore space. In my case that worked out to 14GB. In the first case it used all of it and in the second it used most of it. It kept doing this apparently because of the single large files I kept hitting the drive with. I've now turned off System Restore, put on my Helmet of Shame for the day and now all seems fine again. I can't imagine that I'd need any sort of System Restore data for a partition housing only music files so I should be just fine without losing a nice feature (System Restore has now saved me twice in 2 years).
So, just in case anyone else runs into this, now you know.
I took a spare 120GB drive and added it to my system as a 2nd drive setup as an F: partition formatted Primary and NTFS.
Everything was just fine. Then I started putting my 25MB average ripped songs on it. I got up to about 8GB of music but something odd happened. The folder I stored the music in clearly showed only 8GB of data but the properties for the partition showed 22GB of data being used. I kept wondering where 14GB went. I looked around. Nothing on the drive.... Grrr.
I got annoyed, moved the data off F and onto my D partition. Reformatted F and all was fine again. Started ripping more music. Got to 21GB this time when F came back saying it was using 33GB. Now 12GB was missing. Reformatted again. Again, put back all the files and everything was fine.
Started wondering what was up. I posted the experience to several storage-related forums. No one had any ideas. Posted to several newsgroups. Finally two people on one wrote back that they thought they knew what it was.
Turns out they were right. I had Windows XP's System Restore feature set to the default setting which is turned on (monitoring) and by default it takes UP TO 12% of your disk space to create System Restore space. In my case that worked out to 14GB. In the first case it used all of it and in the second it used most of it. It kept doing this apparently because of the single large files I kept hitting the drive with. I've now turned off System Restore, put on my Helmet of Shame for the day and now all seems fine again. I can't imagine that I'd need any sort of System Restore data for a partition housing only music files so I should be just fine without losing a nice feature (System Restore has now saved me twice in 2 years).
So, just in case anyone else runs into this, now you know.
OMG! You have solved my main problem with my computer!!!!!
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