Where's my hard drive space gone?

Pennywise

I have a 40gb hard drive PC. It is currently showing as 38gb used and 2gb free. OK so far, but the thing is, I've got virtually nothing on it. It has windows xp and drivers for the printers, modem, etc., but the only other program is MS Office (Just Word and Excel). There is about 6gb of data on it being my documents, photos, etc., which I don't think is excessive. I have clicked on "properties" from each folder on the "C" drive, and can't get them to add to more than 10gb, so what on earth is using the other 28gb. As far as I know, I've not partitioned the C drive. The only "funny" thing I've done was to reinstall windows xp a while ago when I started having system problems. Is there any way to reclaim the lost 28gb???

albertross_2

try www.ccleaner.com or search for all files bigger than 10000kb

Pennywise

Thanks for that. I've run ccleaner and it freed up another 1gb so I've now got 3gb free. I also searched for large items as you suggested and there is only 1 file of that magnitude which is a zipped backup and is OK - nothing else comes close. The system clearly thinks the hard drive is being used, is there any way to actually re-set the directory structure as something is clearly wrong.

Chippy_Minton

In Windows Explorer, click Tools - Folder Options - View tab - Show hidden files and folders. When you reinstalled Windows did you put it in the same folder as before, or in a new folder?

Pennywise

Chippy_Minton wrote: »

In Windows Explorer, click Tools - Folder Options - View tab - Show hidden files and folders. When you reinstalled Windows did you put it in the same folder as before, or in a new folder?

Thanks for the advice. I've tried that and there are no hidden files and folders that are using any large amounts of disk space. Re the windows reinstallation, I have no idea whether I put it in the same folder - I did nothing to intentionally put it somewhere else - just put in the original XP installation disk and accepted the defaults.

Is there any way to go back into the old "dos" style of system to do a directory of the hard drive using the old dos commands. I remember once doing it when a similar problem happened years ago (under win 95 or 98) and found a load of files that weren't being noticed by Windows. In those old systems, there was a "restart at c> prompt" or similar command, but I can't see the equivalent in XP?

Tallymanjohn

Use Treesize from:

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

- gives you a clue as to where the big files are.

Chippy_Minton

Pennywise wrote: »

Is there any way to go back into the old "dos" style of system to do a directory of the hard drive using the old dos commands.

Start - Run - cmd - OK. In the black window:

dir c:\*.* /s /o-s > files.txt

Wait for the command to finish, then:

notepad files.txt

Two other things you can do to free some space:

1. Start - All Programs - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup - select C: drive. Tick all the boxes on the Disk Cleanup tab and on More Options click System Restore - Clean up.

2. Download and install the latest Java from http://java.com/en/download/index.jsp, then go into Add or Remove Programs and uninstall all the other Java versions you may have.

Pennywise

Thanks for the help so far. Been on holiday so now back to sorting this. Unfortunately, whilst I have done everything suggested, and reclaimed a small amount, there is still over half the hard drive unaccounted for. Getting a directory doesn't show anything unusual, so I can only conclude that the hard drive has somehow been partitioned or otherwise lost in some way. There is virtually nothing left on the machine now, so I have concluded that re-formatting the hard drive is worth a shot - I have tried format C: but it says the disk is in use and won't let me. Presumably it is windows that is in use - but if I close windows, I close the computer also. So, how can I reformat the hard drive?

albertross_2

You will have to reinstall windows and lose all your data to format c:

have you tried turning off/on system restore?

what does start, run, diskmgmt.msc say?

when you did the search for big files, did you tick advanced, hidden/system files?

droopsnoot

One thing you can try is this: http://www.wheredmyspacego.com/

Stompa

There are a number of utilities that will give you a graphical display of your hard disk usage, this sort of thing:

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/

Might give you a better idea of what's going on.