Find and free disk space that is unused but unavailable (due to file system error, etc.)

Posted by Voyagerfan5761 on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Voyagerfan5761
Published on 2011-02-03T05:24:13Z Indexed on 2011/02/03 7:27 UTC
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disk-space

Sometimes I get the feeling that if an app such as μTorrent allocates files on my FAT32-formatted flash drive, but then is killed or crashes (as happens more than a few times a month), that space just disappears from my file system.

Whether or not that is the case, sometimes I do get a chill from wondering if I've lost hundreds of MB in available storage due to carelessness or malfunctions. Checking my disk with WinDirStat just makes it worse, because I see the huge "<Unknown>" item at the disk root staring at me, eating up well over a gigabyte. It might be FS inefficiency (due to 32 or 64kb sector/cluster size and a lot of tiny files) or it might be a glitch...

Is there a tool I can download and run to check my file system and make sure that there aren't any unused allocated blocks on the disk? I want to make sure I'm not losing any disk space to I/O errors, etc.

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