Where is that other 100gb?

Page 2 - Seeking answers? Join the Tom's Hardware community: where nearly two million members share solutions and discuss the latest tech.

OddsAgainst

Distinguished
Mar 6, 2011
14
0
18,510
I have been trying to clean out extra content from my 500gb HDD because I was down to 50gb left. After finding little to delete, I starting measuring the file sizes to find out where the space on my hard drive was going. Nothing seemed to add up. I measured all the contents inside my hard drive, and I only had about 330gb used. Why is Windows saying that my drive is almost full when it seems to me that I still have a decent amount of space left?
 
Solution
Do you mean that they showed up as "Files" when you ran WinDirStat with administrative privileges?

You should be able to get rid of something in the Temp Folder. When I'm in any doubt what I usually do is to rename the file or folder (to "Files_ToBeDeleted", for example), then reboot and run the system for a day or two to see if anything breaks. If not, then I feel confident that I can go back in and delete it. If there's a problem, I can just rename it back to the original name again.

Did you check the partition layout?