[Solved] C disk space lost ~50GB after uninstalling Visual Studio

[J_G]

Hi, my C disk mysteriously lost ~50GB. Any suggestions to restore that are very appreciated. Thanks a lot!

Before it happened:
My laptop runs Win7 64bit. About 80G of C disk (146G total, SSD) was occupied .

How it happened:
I tried to uninstall Visual Studio(Community Edition) to free some space (~10G), but instead of my gaining 10G, C disk is occupied more.
I thought it's because I didn't fully uninstall Visual Studio, so I went into control panel, diligently uninstalled a dozen of programs that came along with the Visual Studio. I stopped to check how much space is freed, but was surprised that I lost more space: 28G free out of 146G instead.

What I tried:
Disk cleanup. Not helping.
I tried restoring the system to a point before the uninstall. Except losing several programs installed after the restore point, nothing.
WinDirStat shows hibernate.sys and pagefile.sys only occupying ~15GB. Nothing weird.

Solution:
From <http://serverfault.com/questions/419709/whats-eating-my-drive-space-when-normal-files-hidden-system-doesnt-equal-t>
Admin-run cmd:
vssadmin List Shadows
vssadmin Delete Shadows

I need to check out what these 'Shadows' are, but have to reinstall the programs lost in the system restore first...

 

[digitaldoc]

Try running the SMART data for the drive (can use Defraggler). There may be bad sectors on the drive that are being remapped.

 

[ykki]

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/
You can try this.
Some times the problem is windows image. I think it created one after the UN-installation.

How to delete those images
http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-performance/how-can-i-completely-delete-backup-system-images/349ee968-75b5-4dda-a8a3-a7c583f25007

Don't forget to run tree file size in admin mode.