Mystery space taking up hard drive

delly · 31-01-2008 2:23pm #1

Have a look at the pic below. The left side shows the properties of all files and folders on the C: drive, and the right side shows the properties of the hard drive itself. Am I missing something here?

Anti · 31-01-2008 2:30pm

Do you have a D drive thats a partition of C ?

delly · 31-01-2008 2:36pm

Anti wrote: »

Do you have a D drive thats a partition of C ?

Nope, all the one partition.

Sherifu · 31-01-2008 2:45pm

Hidden files and folders?

delly · 31-01-2008 2:48pm

rkm wrote: »

Hidden files and folders?

All set to be seen.

kmick · 31-01-2008 2:51pm

http://windirstat.info/

run this it will tell you which folders are hogging...

stooge · 31-01-2008 2:55pm

is this a new system or did you buy it second hand?

yoyo · 31-01-2008 3:00pm

Is system restore enabled by any chance? That could be it,

Nick

Dorsanty · 31-01-2008 4:09pm

I lost 75% of my disk to system restore folder "c:\System Volume Information\" even though system restore was disabled.

Took me ages to find it but was obvious in the end. Only 'system' account can access the folder by default so jdiskreport wasn't showing it as the big user.

Grrrr! Anyway sorted now.

delly · 31-01-2008 4:46pm

Yep, system restore was enabled which freed up about 3 to 4 gbs, which means I can now see half of the 40gb's. To answer the above its a Dell laptop I have had from new, and I have even taken the hard disk out just to confirm it is a 40gb model.

I have installed the above linked software which sees the c: drive as having 18.6 gb capacity. Very strange tbh

Anti · 31-01-2008 5:17pm

Take the hdd out again and look what way the jumpers are set. You can limity the capacity of a drive by setting the jumpers in a certain posisition. Could be possible... But very unlikely.

yoyo · 31-01-2008 5:34pm

Also mite be worthwhile running a drive fitness scan on it, you can download this diagnostics utility from your hard disks manufacturers site, I've heard cases where hard disks have many bad sectors and are just shoved away and not used, not sure this is the case you have, but it mite be worth trying (you'd usually notice crashing and other stuff happening if loads of bad sectors start coming), also Anti, I doubt that would be the case, as if a limit disk space jumper is used, windows wouldn't report the entire capacity of the drive as it is here... Its a strange one

Nick

jabberwock · 01-02-2008 8:24am

get yourself a visual representation of the drive. might be able to see where it's going then.

spacemonger

delly · 01-02-2008 9:34am

Spacemonger give the following result; having checked the location of the files it seems like they are from my first Windows install. I'm now working on changing privilages in security settings to allow me to delete the old data, but Windows is still being a little anal. Thanks for all the help folks.

Sherifu · 01-02-2008 9:43am

delly wrote: »

Spacemonger give the following result; having checked the location of the files it seems like they are from my first Windows install. I'm now working on changing privilages in security settings to allow me to delete the old data, but Windows is still being a little anal. Thanks for all the help folks.

I believe you'll need a safe mode admin login to change permissions and take ownership, or you could try a live cd. It's still strange they didnt appear in the first file size dialog.

delly · 01-02-2008 10:00am

Managed to get it done in regular login mode by taking ownership of the data.

Et voila:

There is still a small bit of space elsewhere I think, but i'm not really gonna worry too much about as the bulk has now been freed up.

Thanks all

Anti · 01-02-2008 2:21pm

yay solved. I remember having this problem a few years ago. took me a goof while to work out what it was.

Mystery space taking up hard drive

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