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General discussion

Missing Hard Disk Space and Takes Very long to Defrag

Jun 26, 2007 11:26AM PDT

Hi,

I just purchased a Dell E521 and I have a problem with the hard disk space missing.

The following are my specs:

Windows Vista home premium
320 Gig SATA
AMD Athlon x2 4200+
Geforce 7300 LE
2 gig RAM

I know that Windows Vista creates system restore points that takes up a lot of memory, and deleting those old restore points indeed frees up some memory but still there are lots unaccounted for.

For exmaple, in the first occasion it reports using up 70 GIG of hd. But I ran jdisk which only reports 50 GIG. I tried defragging the hd, and after 2 hrs when the defrag hasn't finished, I ran jdisk again, which again reported 50 GIG. Then I checked back my computer specs which finally reported correctly as 50 GIG of hd used.

This time round it reported using up 85 GIG of hard disk space. (with 200 Gig free - the remaining being in a restore disk) Again, I am sure that I never used that much because I account for the programs I have installed. I ran jdisk, which reported 75 GIG of hard disk space used.

This is after I have removed the system restore points,and cleared all temp internet files. I then ran chkdsk (Scan disk) after rebooting my computer. It did not recover any new space. Hence I decided to defrag my computer overnight.

8 hours later, I switched on my computer, to my horror:

- My desktop has not finished defragging
- My desktop now reports using up 95 GIG of hard disk. (Where did the 10 gig come from?!)

I ran jdisk and again it reports 75 GIG of hard disk used only.

Please help and advise, thanks.

Discussion is locked

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RE
Jun 26, 2007 11:35AM PDT

Sorry for replyihng to my own message, but I just used TreeSize to verify, and indeed it reports only 77586 MB used (meaning jdisk is correct), but My Computer still thinks its using 95 GIG.

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Most tree size programs can't count...
Jun 26, 2007 11:16PM PDT

The system restore space taken up.

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murasame05
Jun 26, 2007 11:36PM PDT
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Also
Jun 27, 2007 4:39AM PDT
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Problem solved
Jun 28, 2007 8:22PM PDT

Hi,

Thanks all for the help. Profitt is right; it's the system restore. Although I have removed all the previous restore points, it seems that the *current* restore point takes up a lot of space. When after which the usage ballooned to well over 20 gig, I did a deletion of previous restore again, and bingo I am back with the right free hard disk space available.

As for the defrag, I realised that it's normal for Windows Vista defragmenter taking more than 24 hrs to complete the task (by reading previous posts)

Thanks for the help.