05.03.07

How much space does Windows CD take

Posted in Bugs at 11:07 am by Željko Filipin

I inserted my Windows CD in CD drive, right-clicked it and selected Properties from context menu. It said: “Used space: 573 MB”. Then I selected all files and folders at that drive, right-clicked and selected Properties. It said “Size: 815 MB”. Strange. CD has maximum capacity of 700 MB, right?

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6 Comments »

  1. Michal said,

    May 4, 2007 at 9:30 am

    A tool used by a fool is a foolish tool, and a fool using a tool is a toolish fool. -

  2. Željko Filipin said,

    May 4, 2007 at 9:36 am

    Copy/paste exercise? Or, are suggesting that you have found foolish tool and toolish fool? :)

  3. bret said,

    May 9, 2007 at 7:07 pm

    I’ve heard that MS loads up their CD’s with dummy data to waste the time of the pirates who copy their disks.

  4. Željko Filipin said,

    May 10, 2007 at 9:16 am

    Bret,

    I have also heard that. But what is strange is that 573/815 MB of used space, and 815 MB is much more than 700 MB (that fits on CD).

  5. Dinesh said,

    June 23, 2007 at 4:49 pm

    I think that the way the internal cd directory structure is laid out allows for more than one file entry to point to the same data. I am saying this because i too found out a similar thing for the MS SQL Server 2000 installer CD. In that they have both enterprise and professional versions in it and seperate directories for each version. If i try to calculate the size of these directories it comes to more than 1 GB, while the size of the CD itself shows close to 630 MB+ .

    Even if there are two versions /directories in one CD, there might be surely some files which are common to both the versions, and duplicating them will be at the cost of the CD space.
    So my theory is that they manipulate the CD image in such a way that for these duplicate files they dont have to store the content twice, instead they make sure that the raw file pointers on the disk for these files point to the same location. in this way they save space and can package the whole thing into one CD. since tools like explorer does not about the internal structure, they calculate the size of these files twice and reporting a huge overall size.

    By the way what prompted you to calculate the size through explorer, i thought i was foolish enough to do that. Nice to know there are other curious/foolish people like me.

  6. Željko Filipin said,

    June 28, 2007 at 8:48 am

    Dinesh,

    I think I was making backup copy of my Windows CD when I noticed that.

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