Recovering Hard Disk Space

To Whom this may concern:

You can try the recover some magnetic hard disk unused space by using the Disk Defragmenter in "Windows XP". You may be able to increase the available disk space from about one half to about two thirds of full disk.

 

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Actually a Defragmentation of a harddrive will only recover areas of disk that contain "Dirty data".

No this doesn't mean porn, this means pieces of files that no longer exist but have been left over from having the system define the area's as "being writable".

The way a computer deletes data works on the basis that a particular marker is generated to tell the system whether a particular piece of disk is writeable or contains data.
It makes things writeable rather than "Erasing data", this is why with particular programs it's possible to recover files that have been "Erased" since it was never actually deleted.

Defragmentation works with a process of taking files that have been split to be stored and putting them back together as the block they should be in, this involves writing the portions to a "Empty area" and then writing them back to the nearest empty space towards the beginning of the drive.

This does free up any markers that would have been placed that would have pointed the coordinates of the other fragments.

Windows XP however does use something that most of the other Windows systems didn't use as well, it uses a method of checking the dates of when the files where last accessed/written too and compresses the ones that haven't been accessed over a duration.

This too accounts for space recovery on a disk, however it does increase potential load time for those programs you don't use often because they have to be decompressed to a temporary file on the system before they can be run again.

 

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