Where are my missing 107 GB of disk space?

[8daysaweek]

NB: I'm using Windows 7.

Help Please:

When viewing my HDD drive in: Disk Manager
...it currently correctly shows that my [Disk 1] currently has 3 partitions.

1: But originally when I installed my 2TB HDD:

I initially formatted it with just 1 (partial) partition of 200 GB.
...& Windows automatically created drive (C) with 2 parts, eg:

System reserved: 100 MB
C: 195 GB

The operating system was installed into C:

And when I viewed the drive yesterday, via: [Start] < Computer
...it showed the C: drive as: 20.6 GB free of 195 GB
...so that means that nearly 175 GB has been used.

Yesterday:
I added another partition (of 1TB) (shown as the 3rd-E-Partiton)
& copied all of my data-files to it.

Today:
When I viewed the drive again, via: [Start] < Computer
...it showed the C: drive as: 16.6 GB free of 195 GB
...ie: 4 GB less than yesterday, yet I cant see how that amount of space could have been used.

I was intending to extend the size of the C-Partition,
but it seems that I cant now do this (since adding the 3rd-Partition)
because it seems that you can only extend-a-partition into adjacent/contiguous unallocated space.

So:
As I couldn't understand why so much of the C-Partition had been used up,
I decided to check-out the sizes of all the listed folder on this drive,
including the 'Hidden files & folders' & 'Hidden protected OS files'

Which total: 88 GB / SO WHERE are the reaming 107 GB ! (ie: 195-88=107 unaccounted for)

Many thank.

 

[Dee Kay]

This article will help you find where all your space is at and what may be using it. It also tells you what to do to reclaim some of that space.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/129976-hard-disk-space-free-up-recover.html

 

[Rowdyrauderson]

There could be a few things that take up that space:

Space allocated for hibernation
Pagefile size
Default allocation size

"missing" 88GB sounds bad, but once you think of it in percentages ie.. <5% of your total space, it's not too terrible.

 

[Saberus]

If you only copied the files to E:, then the originals will remain on C: until deleted. (And removed from recycle bin)

What file system are you using, NTFS? FAT32? GPT? Any file table will have small losses to create the file structure.

What's the pagefile size? Is it static or managed by windows? How much RAM is installed? The pagefile's size is factored around this figure.

Have you put the machine into hibernation at all? This creates a file as big as the RAM installed to do a complete copy of the memory.

Also check to see if you have any crashdump files if the system has blue screened recently. A full crashdump will eat up the same space as the memory on your hard disk, every time it happens. So if you have 4GB or RAM, each crashdump will be 4GB. This feature can be disabled in the same location as the pagefile settings.

And finally, some of the missing data could be from the difference between how the computer counts bytes and how humans count bytes.
Hard drives are sold as having 2TB as counted by humans in base 10: 2 Trillion bytes. (Short count, we Americans don't have millards or billards.)
Computers count in base 2, so to the machine 2TB is actually 2,147,483,648 bytes, so the "2.0TB" we see is viewed as just shy of 2TB by the machine.

 

[8daysaweek]

"missing" 88GB sounds bad, but once you think of it in percentages ie.. <5% of your total space, it's not too terrible.

Hi thanks for the reply:

However: 88/195 = 45% missing !!

 

[Rowdyrauderson]

"missing" 88GB sounds bad, but once you think of it in percentages ie.. <5% of your total space, it's not too terrible.

Hi thanks for the reply:

However: 88/195 = 45% missing !!

Of that partition, but not the drive as a whole.

 

[8daysaweek]

If you only copied the files to E:, then the originals will remain on C: until deleted. (And removed from recycle bin).

They were copied from a different HDD (ie: Disk2) into the new 3rd partition on Disk 1 (ie: drive E: )

So they are not duplicated on Disk 1 / drive C.

Many thanks

 

[8daysaweek]

Of that partition, but not the drive as a whole.

BUT: Its that partition (C) that has the missing space.

Thanks

 

[Rowdyrauderson]

Of that partition, but not the drive as a whole.

BUT: Its that partition (C) that has the missing space.

Thanks

BUT: that is also the partition with the OS, correct? That means that backups, pagefile, syslog, hibernation information will all be stored there by default. And depending on how much RAM you have, that could take up the space.

 

[8daysaweek]

BUT: that is also the partition with the OS, correct? That means that backups, pagefile, syslog, hibernation information will all be stored there by default. And depending on how much RAM you have, that could take up the space.

Yes, I understand that, but its still 45% missing from a partition of only 200 GB.

I don't recall having this kind of discrepancy on my previous XP PC.
That PC's disk 1, was less than 200GB, with 3 partitions,
(ie: drive C + 2 BU partitions D+E) so drive C was only about 145GB.
And my data was on disk 2.

If there are valid reasons for this missing space, which I expect there are, then obviously I need to be able to budget for it, or that partition will soon run out of space.

Many Thanks

 

[Saberus]

Did you check for crashdumps, pagefiles, and/or hibernation files? It could help to move the pagefile to another partition to free up space on C:

 

[Rowdyrauderson]

BUT: that is also the partition with the OS, correct? That means that backups, pagefile, syslog, hibernation information will all be stored there by default. And depending on how much RAM you have, that could take up the space.

Yes, I understand that, but its still 45% missing from a partition of only 200 GB.

I don't recall having this kind of discrepancy on my previous XP PC.
That PC's disk 1, was less than 200GB, with 3 partitions,
(ie: drive C + 2 BU partitions D+E) so drive C was only about 145GB.
And my data was on disk 2.

If there are valid reasons for this missing space, which I expect there are, then obviously I need to be able to budget for it, or that partition will soon run out of space.

Many Thanks

So your Windows XP was 32-bit, that means only 2.8GB of RAM was usable. I'm sure you have more than that now.The issues are most likely what has been mentioned above. You do not need to budget for it, just change the default storage locations of the above files.

 

[8daysaweek]

Many thanks everyone for your suggestions.

 

[Mike_Delta]

Hi,

I have similar problem with Win7. I just did the calculations, and all the folders and files from my c-drive (with hidden, page files and hib files) sum up to 107.2 GB. The partition is 236.2 GB. That means the 129 GB is missing. This is in my Vaio laptop with 500 GB drive. I checked that with Total Commander. I accounted for all the folders (also hidden and system folders).

Today I did a system cleanup (with the "clear system files" option) and regain around 9 GB (already accounted in the calcs above), but the numbers are still not adding up.

I just run the c-drive checkdisc with correction of errors (~2 hours) but the issue still exist. I remember few years back I think I had similar issue and the right clic on C -> Tools-> checkdisc repaired the issue. This time it didn't worked.

Any ideas what is going on?

Edit: FIXED! I just found the reason. I had "system restore points" setting set to 50% of the drive capacity (110GB). I changed that to 25GB and regain the rest as free space. By the way, it turns out that you don't see the actual size of the "System Volume Information" folder, where the restore point info is stored.