Lost hard drive space after Vista defrag?

Okay first of all, I have never encountered this issue before while using the XP operating system. Well now I'm on Vista and I just defragged my 74Gb Raptor. The hard drive contains few games in it like CS:S, Cod4 and Crysis. And with all the rest of the softwares and anti-virus etc. Anyways, before defragging the hard drive, it tells me I got about 28.1Gb of free space and after two hours of defragging it's now has 26.9Gb. Now sometime between the defragging session my hard drive lost some space.

Is Vista using that lost space as part of an effecient defragmenting method or what?

I'm not worried about the space, I got plenty on my back up drive but I'm just curious as to why I lost over 1Gb of space after defragging the hard disk.

I'm still not familiar with Vista OS, I'm only using it for the DX10 game Crysis.

Chuck

The Raptor is fine, I did some error check and all sectors good to go. I think it's just Vista, I have googled it as well and found others to have the same issue using Vista defrag. Still can't find any forums as to what happened to the lost drive space.

This Auslogic is totally safe for Vista right? I'll give it a try and post back the result.

Okay, I'm really surprise now.

Before Vista defrag, 28.1Gb space free

After Vista defrag, 26.9Gb space free

After Auslogic defrag, 39.7Gb space free

What's going on here!?

nukemaster -

That's what I'm thinking, maybe Vista is indexing all the files. Question now, I will be testing my games and other software to see if it's faster after the Auslogic defrag. Over 10Gb of data is freed. I hope my softwares are still working right. I'll be back and post some results.

For now, the Auslogic is very comprehensive and has visuals too. The defrag was very fast, assuming since I did it already with Vista. But 10Gb freed? I'm very surprised.

Restart seems to be the same, around 30 seconds. I'll run my games and anti virus to see it's performance.

MrsBytch, thanks for the software advice. I think I like the Auslogic.

I've seen that problem before. Vista seems to like to add a restore point while defragging. At least that was what happened to me.

well i am still on XP......so i will not know until vista SP1 comes out....thats my move date...

Just curious... what version of Vista are you running?

Vista Business & Vista Ultimate both have some pretty fancy features for automatically saving old revisions of files. Don't think that's your problem, but I'm just throwing it out there. It is weird that a simple defrag operation would bloat up on you like that.

O&O Defrag is cool.....but for everyday use i just run the built in one...i have O&O from a time when i could not defrag due to large files(Video related)....

Well it looks like Vista is claiming back the hard drive space. After the Auslogic defrag I freed over 10Gb and totalled 39.7Gb. Now after a week of just using the PC, it's now 34.7Gb. I did not install anything but looks like Vista is taking back the freed space. Tried the Auslogic defrag again but it's not working anymore.

I lost 10 gig of space on my first defrag, This really upsets me. I only have the one hdd I thought WTH ?? so i just ignored it. Then a few days later i defraged again and started losing more space. I quit the defrag and started searching online. Is Vista going to steal space every time i defrag???

please help!!!!

I ran Auslogic and gained...... 0.1 gigs it said it deleted junk files.

But i have not had vista defrag many times yet. and system restore is only on the c: nothing else.

Thanks for signing up just to post that .

When I switched to Vista I did figure that out as well.