On 14 Feb 98 at 0:05, Westly M Montroos wrote:

> A year ago I compressed my hard drive, and since I have
> recompressed it several times. But, when I recompressed my hard
> drive, it tells me that I have gained more hard drive space, but
> when I look in Windows Explorer I do not see any change in the
> space amount of drive C. The computer shows me that I have a H
> drive, and a C drive. On drive C, 450 Mb of free space, and on the
> H drive, like 250 Mb of free space.

  When you create a compressed "volume", it exists as a single large
file on some real hard drive.  OS drivers give this file its own
"drive letter", and allow software that expects to work on drives to
work on the file contents instead.
  So now you have two drive letters, one for the compressed volume,
and one for the host drive that it's on.  That's where H: comes into
the picture.
  DriveSpace provides an option to hide the host drive, to operate as
if the compressed volume were the only relevant part of the drive.
This is convenient for day-to-day use.  But there's no requirement
that your compressed volume take up *all* of the space on the host
drive -- you see 250MB of unoccupied space on H: which will become
inaccessible while the host drive is hidden.

  The process of compressing a drive combines building a compressed
volume and transferring files from the host drive into the compressed
volume[*].
  I'm not at all certain what you mean by "recompressed", though.
You can use DriveSpace to change the size of the compressed volume,
larger or smaller (which will change the amount of free space left on
H:), or to dump the files back onto the host drive and delete the
compressed volume file[*].  You can also change the compression
method, typically increasing compressed capacity at the expense of
CPU time.

> First question, when I am installing a program, can I install a program on
> drive H?

  Unless you have hidden the host drive, it is an ordinary
uncompressed drive like any other, that happens to have a really big
file on it.  Yes, you can install software there.
  I don't generally recommend it.  Compressing and uncompressing
drives causes drive letters to swap around.  Far too many
applications write multiple keys to the registry specifying drive
letters, and moving such applications is a real pain.

> Second question, when I compress my hard drive, where do the free spaces go?

  There are two free spaces.  There is free space on the host drive
(H:), which can be increased by shrinking the compressed volume.  And
there is unallocated space within the compressed volume, which is
reported by taking the actual free space and multiplying it by the
average effectiveness of the current compression method, which may be
increased either by changing the method or increasing the size of the
compressed volume.

David G


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