Deleted free space

[woodend16789]

Having accidentally deleted free space on my hard drive, I would like to know if there is any way of recovering this. I only have 220G now when I should have 350. I know that some of that 350 is taken up with system files etc. but I would like to recover some of the lost space. Any ideas?? Thanks in advance.

[jno]

how do you delete free space? As far as I know all you can do is fill it. If you 'delete' an individual file it doesn't actually go anywhere, it just allows it to be overwritten with new files.

[snags]

As jno says, when you delete a file, the file is not actually deleted, only the pointer that tells the Operating System where the file is located. The 'deleted' file is still there on your hard drive until such time as it is overwritten by new data and would be recoverable by most data recovery software.

Actually 'erasing free space' writes '0's to the drive, essentially overwriting whatever data was 'deleted', in order to make it unrecoverable.

Once the process has finished, all the free space will be returned to it's previous free space status.

On a Mac, there is the option to 'secure empty trash' rather than the standard 'empty trash'. Secure empty trash performs the writing of '0's as mentioned above and actually 'frees up' disc space. Is this process what you are actually asking about?

I don't know if Windows has the equivalent of Mac's 'secure empty trash' feature).

[VHG]

A hard disk can be taken up with partitions (one may be 220Gb the other 130Gb).

If you have deleted the 130Gb partition then that would leave the 220Gb partition, and the rest as "unallocated space".

Can you tell us

How big your actual hard disk is (NOT the partitions but the whole hard disk).

How many partitions you have on the disk (C: D: or whatever) and how big they are.

You can find out both of these quite easily using Windows "Disk Management".

[woodend16789]

Hello VHG
Hard disk is 350G
2 partitions 120 and 100