Question C Drive showing no free space but there should be over 150 GB of free space on it.

[davidt0504]

My C: drive is reporting both with Win10 notifications and on the file explorer as being either almost completely full (tens of mb free) or completely full with 0 bytes free.

However, when I personally scan through the properties of all directories on said drive, it doesn't add up to the total limit of the drive, not even close. The drive is a 250GB SSD. WinDirStat shows that there's only 46.2 GB in use (which is pretty much what I find when I personally look too). When I click the notifications that windows has for low disk space, it shows close to 175 GB of temporary files. However, when I click to clean them, I only get a few dozens of MB. CCleaner doesn't work and clicking the option on the windows storage settings doesn't work either.

My first thought is whether or not this could be a virus. We have Norton for active protection and scans and also the free version of Malwarebytes for scanning. I've run Norton and Malwarebytes both in safe mode and they haven't found anything.

I'm not sure what to do next. Could it just be a bad hard drive? I have 3 other hard drives hooked up to my computer but this is the one that my OS is installed on.

 

[kanewolf]

Start by going to Settings -> System -> About -> (scroll down) to System Info Look at the System Protection option on the left. Look at the "Configure restore settings". Change the value for the C: to be a smaller number.

 

[davidt0504]

Change the value for the C: to be a smaller number.

It's set to 0 %/bytes. I'm 99% sure I've had to revert to a restore point on this machine before.