Buffalo 500GB External HD -- missing space?

I have a 500GB Buffalo external hard drive that I use for music, pictures and misc backed up documents. The problem is, I seem to be missing a few GB's.

The HD shows:
173 GB of music
2 GB of pictures
5 GB of documents
180 total should be listed....

.... but instead it tells me that 446 GB are being used and the HD is nearly full! For the life of me, I can't figure where all this "extra stuff" is located. Why would my HD be saying it's so full, but I can't find anything else on it?

I did a disk cleanup on the HD, then I did a Windows defrag on it... and it still shows 446 GB being used in total.

Any ideas?
Thanks,
-Steve

 

You could backup all the stuff do your desktop and reformat it but that would take some time copying over 180gb of date.

Format will remove all data on that drive.

 

A similar thing happens with my WD250GB and it only shows up a size of 232.88GB someone has explained this once before but for the life of me I can't remember why it was like this.

Using "hdd size difference" in google will come up with some answers for you:

http://www.acronis.com/resource/tips-tricks/2004/missing-megabytes.html

http://www.technical-assistance.co.uk/kb/hddsize.php

 

My first thought would be that windows is taking the space for the system restore. I just added a slave 80gig drive to my system and the first thing I checked was the system restore properties, and it shows that it was using either 10 or 12% for the restore point. Also, the system will (I believe) take part of the drive for the "Recycle Bin" ( I think default is 10%). Right click on the Recycle Bin, select properties, and it will show how much is being reserved for the recycle bin. You can from there configure each drive/partition independently.

And just because, I would also go into the folder options and uncheck the "Hide protected system operating files" and put a check in the "Show hidden files and folder". You should then be able to see where the extra space is being taken.

 

Go to control panel,admin tools,computer management,disk management then check the size of your disk drive and check the whole drive is partitioned.

 

Also, if you have a 250 GB hdd, you may only actually have 232.88 GiB.

http://www.pcguide.com/intro/fun/bindec-c.html