Lost MB on new NTFS Partitions

Hi

I have three computers with clean installations of Win2000. Each computer has two 20GB hard drives with drive #1 partitioned as C: & E: and drive #2 partitioned as D: & F:. The partitions are a mix of FAT 32 and NTFS but all C: partitions are NTFS and have the OS loaded.

The D/E/F partitions are all supposedly empty at this stage, but those that are formatted NTFS are variously showing between 22MB and 62MB of disk space taken up with unreadable information. The FAT partitions are all showing full space available apart fromm a few KB.

Most of the drives were new but those that were not have been re-formatted etc.

Where have my missing MB gone and how do I get them back?

Any explanations or advice will be most welcome.

John C.

Following up on my previous post, I have done some research and find that NTFS reserves space on each volume (partition?) for the Master File Table.

However, I can't imagine that this would take up to 6% of a 10GB partition so I probably still have a problem. I also find that one of the FAT32 partitions also seems to have inherited this problem. The 990MB contents of a 1.2GB FAT drive were copied to this partition and now it shows 2.12GB used. None of this seems to make sense to me.

By the way, my Norton antivirus is right up to date and scans clean on all drives.

John

I hope nobody notices that I talk to myself, or that I don't know the difference between 6% and 0.6%! Doh!

That gets rid of my NTFS partition problems but I'd still like to hear if anybody can suggest an explanation as to why 900MB of FAT32 data expands to take up over 2GB when transferred to another FAT32 partition.

Did the data consist of lots of small files. FAT is generally inefficient with small files.

Some installations are more efficient than others. For example my FAT partition currently uses 4kB clusters, so a file smaller than 4k will still use 4k of disk space.
But some partitions use much larger cluster sizes, eg 32kB. So you can probably see that if you have many smaller files, a lot of space will be wasted.

Although 1100MB does seem a lot.