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Explorer is reporting the wrong amount of free space (FAT32 Free Space Bug)

Intended For
Windows Me
Windows 98
Windows 95
FAT32 is the modern mechanism used by the operating system to keep track of the files on your hard disk. It replaces FAT (file allocation table), used by Windows 3.x and Windows 95 (original release); it is more efficient in the way it stores files (allowing a smaller cluster size), and it supports larger hard disk partitions (well over FAT's 2-GB limit). The only drawback is the free space bug.

FAT32 is supported by Windows 95 OSR2 (aka revision 'b'), Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. FAT32 is not supported by Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 95 (original release).

Every once in a while, especially if your computer crashes, you may notice that Windows does't calculate the amount of free space on a drive accurately. For example, if you have 800 megabytes of data on a 1 gigabyte disk (not counting slack space), Windows might actually report that the drive is full. To repair this problem, do the following:

  • Run Scandisk (scandskw.exe in Windows, scandisk.exe in DOS). If there is a discrepancy, it will be fixed.

  • Note: this will only resolve the temporary discrepancy - it won't eradicate the bug.

Note that Windows 2000 and XP, when running on FAT32, don't appear to suffer from this problem. Furthermore, both Windows 2000 and XP also support the NTFS file system, which is more secure than FAT32.


Written by: Annoyances.org
Last updated: Saturday, August 11, 2001

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