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General discussion

Missing space on hardrive

Aug 24, 2010 3:16AM PDT

hey
i have been using DELL INSPIRON 1564 series. I have 2 partitions....
Wiondows 7 has been installed on drive c: which has a capacity of 97 gb, out of which only 3 gb is left somehow now...i have scanned the drive and i did not find anything installed of that size. So i am losing on around 60-70 gb (after taking into account windows 7 and other bare minimun files).

Discussion is locked

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How did you scan the drive?
Aug 24, 2010 5:34AM PDT

Windows 7 has hidden folders and files. Did you unhide those?

How did you scan this drive for disk usage? Windows Explorer isn't that accurate when calculating file/folder sizes, but even so it should be able to pinpoint areas of large files/folders.

Mark

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Re: disc space
Aug 24, 2010 5:41AM PDT

The good news: in all comparable cases in these forums, this has been solved. The bad news: it might be a lot of work.

The tools to use:
1. chkdsk to tell the exact amount of space used for several categories
2. treesize free from http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ or a comparable program to see the size of all folders and be able to drill down to subfolders
3. icacls command line utitility to grant yourself access to system folders used for System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy. Those might take a lot of disk space that's unaccounted for normally.

There are known cases of people having an unexplainable 20 or 30 GB file in their System Volume Information folder.

In the end, every single sector on the hard disk can be accounted for.

Kees

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Re: disc space
Aug 24, 2010 5:51AM PDT

I have scanned hardrive using the updated antivirus and it did not detect any viruses (NOD 32).
I deleted some of the stuff from the hardrive to create some space (around 3 gb) and some how after an hour i lost that too. Its full again now..
how do i used this command and will it help?
"icacls command line utitility to grant yourself access to system folders used for System Restore and Volume Shadow Copy. Those might take a lot of disk space that's unaccounted for normally."

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Re: icacls
Aug 24, 2010 6:03AM PDT
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Missing space on hardrive
Aug 24, 2010 5:52AM PDT

I have scanned hardrive using the updated antivirus and it did not detect any viruses (NOD 32).
I deleted some of the stuff from the hardrive to create some space (around 3 gb) and some how after an hour i lost that too. Its full again now..