Won't you tell me - where has all my hard drive space gone?

[annenap]

I'm missing about 95 GB from my calculations.

When I look at properties of drive C it says I have a total of 140 GB used space. That had me concerned, so I went through all the primary sub-directories of C:, got the properties of each one added them up in Excel and came up with 45 GB used. I am displaying hidden files & protected O/S files.

Any suggestions? I really need this space.

Thx!
Anne

[Bill_Marsden]

What is the operating system and system specs.

[annenap]

Xp He
1gb Ram
Amd 64 3200+
160 Gb Hd

[prankz]

anne, do u have norton anti-virus?

[annenap]

Nope - AVG

[prankz]

hmmm ok that plan is now scrapped,

ermm ok, anne have tried 'disk cleanup' as well as 'disk defrag'

[DAKz]

and you may want to do a back up and get rid of system restore files, they can go through a group of drive space!

[erikske]

Originally Posted by DAKz

and you may want to do a back up and get rid of system restore files, they can go through a group of drive space!

That one made me say 'Where did all my HD space go????'. To clean go to Disk Cleanup, 'More options' tab and click 'Clean up' in the 'System restore' box.

[matt.chugg]

Theres a couple of nifty tools listed on this thread that will let you see what folders and files are taking up what percentage of your drive.

[annenap]

Thanks Matt - that was exactly what I was looking for. I wound up finding it a different way:

I was going to just backup my docs & re-format. When I went to do the backup, it came to my attention that that's where all the storage issues were.

Turns out that in Docs & Settings there is a Compaq_Owner folder that was hogging everything. I had to take ownership of the folder and then I was able to delete almost all of it (except a few subfolders in Application Data\Microsoft\Installer). Now I've got 107 GB free.

Thanks all,
Anne

PS Sytem Restore files are only allowed 12% of HD space - so I knew that wasn't the issue.