Over 100gb Missing and Unaccounted For

[danoster]

Hey, Tom's Hardware Forum. I have a problem. I’m missing over 100gb on my C drive and I have no idea why. According to Windows Explorer, about 270gb is taken up in files and yet I only have about 70gb free. The total drive capacity is 455gb!

The Dell recovery partition is only 10gb in size. Also, I've run chkdsk and it did not solve the problem. I'm using Win 7.

Any ideas? Thanks!

- Dan

 

[acer0169]

Corrupt hard drive? Has it ever failed?

 

[sub mesa]

System Restore probably, if you really need the space, remove all but the recent system restore points, or move the slider from the default 8% to 1% for example.

Good luck.

 

[acer0169]

Ahh good point, could very well be system restore. If you right click on your local disk in question and go to properties, then disk cleanup.. once it's done working out what you can remove there is a tab for "more options". From that tab, there is an option to delete all but most recent restore point and this can save you no end of space. Then as sub mesa has said, limit the system restore to say 5% of your total space to stop it doing this again.

 

[danoster]

The drive is not corrupt (i.e. it's never failed on me). Could System Restore really take up 100gb of space? And have it not show up in Windows Explorer? Or WinDirStat?

I ran Disk Cleanup on C but go no option for "More Options." How specifically do I get to an area where I can delete restore points?

Thanks.

- Dan

 

[danoster]

Hey, guys. Nevermind. I found the System Restore deletion options. I took a deep breath and deleted all but the most recent restore points.

It looks like that gave me back just under 60gb. So while it doesn't account for 100% of the missing space, it gave back enough to appear to be the culprit.

Thanks for your help!!

- Dan

 

[acer0169]

Once you run Disk Cleanup it should give you a list of what can be removed. Up at the top there is a tab called "more options" or "advanced" or something like that. On that page, there is the option to remove old restore points.

And yes.. system restore can take up to 100% of your disk space unless configured otherwise. I believe by default this should be at 10%, but that's not always the case.

I've removed 40GB of system restore points before.

Remember to use tools like CCleaner also to remove temp files and temp internet files.. I've gathered up to 20GB of temp files before.

 

[danoster]

Best answer selected by danoster.

 

[acer0169]

Thanks for the BA, appreciated!

 

[SAND_99]

wow, just recovered 53Gb by deleting temp files!