Windows not showing files moved to external drive.

Hi. The Dir command only shows the files I can see in Windows. The properties states space used is 58.9 Gb, free space is 313Gb, capacity is 372GB. Yet the files I can highlight add up to 4.77GB.

I'm at a loss as to why that's happening. I would download and run WinDirStat to see if it can find what is taking up the space on there.

WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

Thanks. WinDirStat just shows 4.8GB is being used - the same files and folders I can see in Windows. I think I'll just have to put this down to experience and call it a day. Thanks for your help anyway.

I understand the frustration, as I'm experiencing the same trying to figure out what is actually going on here. I'm just curious as to why it's happening now.

Can you see other files if they're copied over? Is it only your music directory that is disappearing?

Not to worry. The Music files had some video files and jpegs as well. I decided just to copy off the 4.8Gb that I could see and reformat the drive. When I did this Windows reported that some files could not be copied as they were corrupt (??). I then deleted the souce files which went into the Recycle Bin. When I emptyed the Recycle Bin Windows reported it was recycling over 50GB of files (????). Thanks for your help anyway it is much appreciated.Mike

Yea, it's probably best to just reformat as NTFS. Sorry we couldn't figure it out.

The maximum number of clusters FAT 32 can handle for a partition is 65536. Now for a 372GB drive each cluster should be 8MB in size. And no matter how small they are, each of your file will occupy ONE cluster. Even if many of your files is only, say, 3MB, each will occupy 8MB. That's the reason behind.

Right-click a folder -> Properties
You will see two values for size, one is the actual size of all the files, the other is the size on disk. You will see the big difference.

The fix? NTFS!