Fill volume up with data consisting of 0’s
Hard drives can be empty, and they can be mostly full. But they are never entirely full, are they?
Non-full hard drives are a nuisance to me. That being said, I’ve been looking into different ways of combating this phenomenon. Here’s a couple of solutions that don’t really work.
- Find something useful to do with the free space like writing poetry in weighty Word documents that take up a couple of megabytes for each file.
- Ignore it and rejoice because it’s nice to have free space, why not?
- Enjoy life and drink plenty of coffee.
Only one of these options is really feasible, and while it might be a good bet, it’s also possible to combine it with the correct answer to the question posed a long time ago.
On a Windows XP SP3 installation you will have access to the recommendable program that is fsutil. It comes with the system. For the sake of the example, let us say the drive letter in question is D.
fsutil volume diskfree D:
This will print you the amount of free disk space free in bytes. Let’s say the number of bytes free is 1234567890, why not. That’s just over a gigabyte! Now copy (or remember if you’re so inclined) the number of bytes free, and let your fingers dance to this command.
fsutil file createnew D:\MY_FILLER_FILE 1234567890
Discounting external factors the D drive will now be full – not just close to. Incidentally it might be a bad idea to do this on the system drive (usually the C drive) as it’s very fond of disk space being free there. Try it though if you want Windows to suffer.
Note: Tested on Windows XP SP3 with the version of fsutil that come with that.
Funny! :D I miss a fourth option involving women and alcohol.
You never call.