20GB missing hard disk space Win7, any ideas?

JasX

This one has me scratching my head a little but have been tidying up my hard drives yesterday and for the second time I've completly emptied a drive AND my recycle bin but there is still something hogging 20GB of space.

Yes if I reformat it comes back but I'd really don't want to be emptying and formating drives regularly if it starts re-occuring, didn't notice it happening before I got onto Windows7 (64-bit)

Anyone else seen this or have any ideas?

my old portable drive is only 100GB so the 20GB that vanished on that one was 20% of the whole drive :mad:

Screenshots below, recycle bin is empty, hidden files made visible, running 'disk cleanup' doesn't seem to help either

gaming_guy

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Richie-from-the-Boro

I back up each Friday so I turn VSS / VSC off, I also did this in the Vista days.

It has other implications.

KingL

not that it'll help you much, but I used to have a problem in XP (SP1, I think) whereby if I deleted a folder containing files it wouldn't free up the disc space. If I went into the folder and deleted the files, then it would (and I could delete the empty folder later on). Never found what it was down to. Maybe worth a look.

The other instance I had was an old proprietary restore software, which hid a huge image file in it's program folder everytime you made a restore point..

JasX

Hmm, dug into system protection and its definitely off for the affected drive, its only active for my C drive and limited to about 10GB which doesn't seem to unreasonable, does that discount that as a cause?

tbh i virtually never use system restore, I keep my OS on a separate partition and tend to reinstall from scratch if ever I have a serious problem.

John_Gray

Run TreeSize Free - it should tell you what's on the disk.

gaming_guy

Does anything appear on the drive if you browse the drive after booting from a Linux live CD (eg Ubuntu 10.04 LTS)?

JasX

Update: just to be sure I've run the following

H:\>vssadmin Delete Shadows /All
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Do you really want to delete 19 shadow copies (Y/N): [N]? Y

Successfully deleted 19 shadow copies.

H:\>

Still mising my 20GB after that

popping out for a bit now, will run treesize when I get back later on and see how i get on

GeoffX

Have a look at Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management, then look at Storage -> Disk Management to see the drive's actual layout. Windows 7 creates an extra partition at the start of the disk, but I thought this was limited to 100MB.

michaelro

Although you have selected to show hidden files, the options below (hide operating files) are still enabled.

Could be a pagefile.sys file? (This will only show when you disable the hide operating files option)

[Deleted User]

Am I reading it wrong, or is that a 1TB drive with the unaccounted 20GB representing just over 2% of the actual volume?

In any case, at a guess (and a hungover one at that) I'd suggest that the space is being occupied by the operating system in order for the filesystem to operate its various functions, I.e nothing out of the ordinary.