Missing GB's

One of the drives in my system is a WD VRap 150 GB, SATA which I dedicate to only run Flight Simulation. When first installed and formatted it showed 139 GB’s available. I have two files loaded on this drive: Flight Simulator X taking 62.3 GB’s of space. I also have flight Simulator Addons taking 4.63 KB. A total of 63 GB’s. When I subtract the 63 GB’s from the 139 GB’s I get 76 GB’s that should be available. However properties only show 36 GB’s available. That shows that there is 40 GB’s somewhere. Flight Simulator X runs best on a drive that has around 50% free space and I would prefer to run it that way. No one has been able to tell me what happened to the 40 GB’s as yet.
My question is: I have these files backed up as image files on an external drive. Would it be safe to delete these files from the HDD, do a new format and then re-install the FSX files back on the HDD? Is there a chance that restore the lost 40 GB’s? Am I liable to get into trouble here? Thanks for the help.

 

You're fine as formatting takes up some GB and yours is right in line with the norm. :major

Whoops! Do you have SP2 installed for XP??

 

Your computer may also have created it's page file on that drive. This is something that you can move if you want to.

The instructions in this link are for Vista, but they apply to all version of Windows:

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/understanding-windows-vista-paging-file-size/

The one step they miss is when you right-click on "my computer" you choose "properties" then "advanced system settings" in the blue bar on the left of the screen.

Please be aware that a page file is an essential part of Windows and it is a good idea to keep at least the recommended size available for the computer's use. Also set the minimum and maximum values to the same so the computer doesn't have to slow itself down resizing it every 5 minutes if you use it a lot.

Be aware also that it doesn't matter what drive it is on, just make sure it still exists!

 

Thanks guys, I have run WinDirSat and it shows that I used about 15GB for the FS installation and 48 GBs for addon scenery. I could not detect any kind of duplicate files.
I am running W7 Home 64 bit. I do have recycle bin on this drive but it only has 4 KB. I have very little junk on my PC and ru CCleaner all of the time. I will check in to the page file option to see if that indicates anything. Thanks for the help.

 

Try a couple of things right-click the Recycle Bin and select Properties. See how much space you have allotted/reserved to that drive. By default it may be something like 10% or 13GB. You can reduce that size to something reasonable. If the most valuable file you could accidentally delete is 500mb then set it to something like that.

Type system protection in the start>search box and see how much space is being reserved for system restore on that drive. Again it may be 10% of the capacity or 13gb.