jezzarisky

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Nov 27, 2008
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So I was looking at my single hard drive I have installed and it says that I have 360gigs free of 600gigs on the HD, I have looked at all of the files with in the C drive that are visible and the approximate total I came up with was 150gigs which means I SHOULD have about 450gigs free not counting the OS, and yet, I cannot image the OS to take up 100gigs of free space. The only thing I can think of, when I was having troubles installing windows the first time I didn't realize that my comp wouldn't boot because it was looking for a floppy so I attempted to install windows several times. Would that be why I have lost so my HD space? and if so, how to I delete the obsolete versions I'm not using?
 

jezzarisky

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Nov 27, 2008
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So my disk management had no mention of any unnamed partitions. so I installed the cleaner and used that, and I believe I may have gotten another 12gigs out of that, even though it only deleted 1meg of files. not sure how that works, but I'm still about 80gigs from where I should be.
 

xcess

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Oct 15, 2008
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i have to issue also ,i look for the missing files to equal the total space used and never adds up i even reinstall etc etc the whole 3 pointers ...hope they help u find the answer to it so i can know why i am that issue also ama bookmark this...
 
The disk properties display total disk space and how much of it is used. That includes all files, even hidden files like pagefile.sys, etc. To view all files on your hard disk, you should to select "Show hidden files and folders" and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files" (which is not recommended). Even that won't show you all disk usage. If you have lots of small files, then a significant amount of disk space can be lost. To understand what I mean, display the properties of a file and you'll notice that it's size usually is smaller that it's size on disk. You can lose almost 4K per file. By default, a 1 byte file requires 4K of disk space.
 

jezzarisky

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Nov 27, 2008
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I kinda guessed something like that, but it just seems a little extreme to lose 80 gigs due to small and hidden files. I can't image vista taking up more than 20-25 and maybe in some extreme case 5gigs to small files that still doesn't add up to 80. I did find one guy who was having a similar problem as I am, and from the sounds of it his computer was still holding all of his previous restore points, and when he got rid of those it cleared up 98% of what was lost.