hard drive says it is twice as full as it actually is. Why?

Question

I have an IBM x41 tablet with a 40GB hard drive. The hard drive is actually only 37.4GB, but that isn't the problem. The drive is partitioned into a 5.1GB partition and a 32.3GB partition. The 32.3GB partition is my C drive and it says that I am using 31.2GB, but when I scan every file on the drive it says it only has 15.6GB worth of files.
I have checked and there are no other partitions. Also, I have emptied the temporary internet files. I also have CCLeaner, but it doesn't really do much. Last time I ran CCLeaner it only freed up 30MB.
If anyone can help me fix this, or at least tell me what's going on, I would greatly appreciate it.

I had already set my folder options to view hidden files and folders.
I have defragmented my hard drive, but that didn't free up any space.
I also compressed old files to free up a few hundred MB, but still at less than 2GB of freespace.

Answer 1

it may not be counting hidden / system files

Answer 2

Yeah thats pretty strange.
The only thing I can compare to for this is a busted harddrive. It's probably not that though. I have a semi-broken drive that reports only 846Mb in files, on a 400gb drive. Thats because all the rest is unreadable causing the system to continously lock up when reading the drive. I guess this isn't happening.

It might be worth doing a free pc scan here to see if anything obvious comes up. - This site is safe btw
http://pcpitstop.com/pcpitstop/default.asp

-------EDIT------
I'm presuming your've also had a look at the partitions right?

The only other thing at the moment I can think of would be to use a seperate file reporting tool. Disk manager software of some kind. See if that reports the same lack of space.

Answer 3

In Windows there are a lot of system files that are hidden and don't show up on explorer.
15 Gig is way too much for this though.
try a defrag.... it might free up some sectors.