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General discussion

LOST HARD DRIVE SPACE - HELP!!!

Dec 9, 2010 5:43AM PST

Okay, I have an eMachines computer with Windows Vista Ultimate. I have a 120GB hard drive (I have taken a look at the hard drive itself to confirm this), but in the My Computer window, it's reading that I have only a 31.4GB hard drive, and I only have 0.97GB of free space left. I only have a total of 3 songs downloaded, and about 5 documents in wordpad, but they are only KB in size. Everything that I have downloaded should not equal to what it does. Plus, I have over half of my hard drive space missing! What on earth is going on here?? How can I fix this?? Please, help! Any advice anyone can give me is greatly appreciated! I don't know what to do! Every day I run Disk Cleanup and CCleaner, and it frees up only MB in space, and on top of that, the space I have left will randomly decrease without me even downloading anything! Yesterday I had about 1.74GB of free space, today I only have 0.97, and some days I'll only have merely MB of space left! And I downloaded nothing! Please, please help! What do I do??
Thank you!

Discussion is locked

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That's two subjects.
Dec 9, 2010 5:51AM PST

The drive size and partitions are is often found when you look at the drive management tool in Vista. Be sure you look there. Your drive c was created by someone that set it to 32GB.

As to what is creating files behind your back there are too many to list here but read this forum's top post at http://forums.cnet.com/7723-12546_102-238817.html?tag=threadListing;forum-threads and specifically post number 14.
Bob

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I See...
Dec 11, 2010 4:33AM PST

Well, I know what happened to the extra GB, then. A while back, my computer got infected with a Trojan worm, and my uncle, who is a whiz with electronics (especially computers), had to wipe everything off my computer in order to fix it. So, he must have set my hard drive to 32GB, instead of back to 120. Jeez. That sucks.
Well, with that aside now, is there anything I can do to free up some more space? Because the thing runs so slow now. I use Disk Cleanup regularly and CCleaner, I run virus scans and malware/adware/spyware scans regularly as well. I clean everything out, or quarantine it when it cannot be removed. But it still has so much space gone and I know that the programs I have downloaded aren't taking up that much space. So, is there anything I can do to get more free space and/or make it run faster? Any suggestions are appreciated.
Thank you for your reply, Bob. And thanks to anyone else who replies.

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(NT) Why not use that other 88 GB?
Dec 11, 2010 4:45AM PST
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Why not use it?
Dec 11, 2010 5:42AM PST

It could be drive D or another. Put stuff there.
Bob

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That 32 GB rings a bell ...
Dec 11, 2010 8:34AM PST

and I will bet that that "whiz" uncle formatted the drive as FAT32 when he re-installed.

If you follow this link http://gparted.sourceforge.net/ and download the gparted live cd iso (this is a direct link - http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php ) it will allow you to grow your partition to the full size of the drive.

I would really recommend that you FIRST convert the file system to NTFS and this is done very simply by opening a command prompt (click Start > Run then type CMD and then OK) and typing the following bolded text into the command prompt and then pressing the Enter/Return key - CONVERT C: /fs:ntfs

Both the file system conversion and the resizing of the partition are designed to be non-destructive but it is always advised to ensure that any important data is BACKED UP before performing either just in case of problems.