Hard drive disc space unaccounted for

Having bought a new laptop I am trying to clean up my old one to pass it on to a family member. I have deleted all personal documents, pictures, etc, just left some essential applications such as an email program, a photo editing program, an antivirus program, Mozilla Firefox, nothing major... Total disc space is 60 GB. Adding up all the programs and system files in the Windows folder etc gives me approx. 10 GB. According to C-drive properties free space is 18 GB. I can't for the life of me figure out where the remaining 30 + GB are hiding. I did disc clean-up and defragmented the drive. According to all indications there are no major problems. Any ideas, any thoughts what's happening here?

 

I did it, no problems there: basic partition, healthy system, capacity 55.88 GB (not 60 as I had assumed), free space 18.92 GB, 33% free, overhead 0% (whatever that means)

 

Thanks all for you input. I was able to recover about 6 GB by eliminating the windows restore files. It still leaves a large portion unaccounted for. I have decided to reformat the drive and reinstall the applications. Thanks again.

 

I think reformatting and reloading is going to be much more work than you can justify.

I suggest that you get TreeSize Free and use it to locate the used space you are concerned with.

I hate to see you spend 3 days of grief reloading your system for no real gain. I'm assuming it works well as it is.

 

Thanks! I downloaded and ran TreeSize Free, but it did not solve the mystery. According to TreeSize my C drive contains 10,650 MB. System Volume Information is listed as access denied, but it has 0 MB - I assume that is System Restore which I had disabled.

When I right-click on the C drive in My Computer, it shows that 31,100 MB are used - not the 10,650 MB indicated by TreeSize - and that 24,700 MB is free space, giving a total capacity of 55,800 MB. That still leaves 20,450 MB unaccounted for!

As an aside, I was surprised to see 709 MB allocated to the Recycler although the Recycle Bin is empty.

 

Thanks. That makes sense.

 

Hmmm

Active and free space counts can be effected by certain disk errors.

I would do a chkdsk and then recheck the counts after.

Start-Run
type
chkdsk /r
ok

It will warn of not having exclusive access and ask for permission do do the chkdsk on the next reboot. OK that and reboot.

But before doing this, since you have cleaned/removed so much I would run ATF-Cleaner "select all" do Firefox and Opera also, run 2-3 times for each till it says no more to clean.

Also run CCleaner Temps and Registry repeatedly untill it comes up clean.

Finally I agree with surferdude2 on formating even if in the end you can not resolve this issue. Because it has never caused you and issue and so may be a reporting issue only (very likely).

Mike

 

I did so. It just shows one partition. Nothing hidden.

 

Well, I finally nailed it, but can't fix it. I ran a demo of TreeSize Professional, that gave me the answer: there are two system volume information files, one named _restore{D.......} with 16,461 MB and the other _restore {33....} with 7,503 MB. I tried to get rid of them by turning off system restore on the control panel (which I had actually done before) and also doing Disk Clean-up ... More Options and then clean-up System Restore ... but nothing works. The volume information files turn up unchanged when I run TreeSize again. So where should I go from here?

By the way, thanks Surferdude2 for pointing me to TreeSize - it is really an amazing program!

 

You obviously have some flaw in the System Restore applet that is not dumping the old files.

You can do that manually and possibly fix your problem. To do so, you will first need to disable System Restore and reboot.

Then go to Start > Run > and type CMD (press enter)

When the command window opens, type:
cacls "C:\System Volume Information" /e /g owner:f

That assumes your User Identity is Owner, if not, change that accordingly in the command script. Be sure to get the spaces proper in the command script and press enter. You should get confirmation of the process. If you don't get the confirmation, you did something wrong and will need to try again. It must be typed exactly as I have given, quotes, spaces, and all.

Properly executed, that will give you full access to the System Volume folder and will allow you to manually delete the contents. Delete all files it contains.

 

I typed in this command and am getting this message: processed dir: C:\System Volume Information " and then I am back at the command prompt. When I check the hard drive nothing has changed.

 

I copied the command exactly as posted and all I am getting is the above response, no access to any files to delete.