Hard drive grew 30gb in 1 sec.?

I have a total of 298gb hard drive and I've been having trouble with the hard drive, it seems to be taking up too much space. It was down to 248gb with windows, DELL drivers, and just a few system management tools installed on it. 50gb is too much space for just those programs. I went to Norton website because someone at DELL told me it might be a virus. Long story short to remove a specific virus Norton told me to disable or turn off automatic restore points before continuing. When I disabled automatic restore my hard drive jumped right then to 278gb gaining 30gb. So, what was the problem? Is there still a problem?

 

I went back and read all your posts concerning this before replying! Seems like your hard drive has increased from 288 to 298 gigs from your last post. Gaining hard drive space after deleting the system restore points is common, as it deletes/makes available the space being used by this function!

My question is, did you follow auggie and Bill's advice concerning Norton in your previous threads/posts? Did you read and try what the Norton representative suggested to the person with the problem of definition files taking up too much space? If not, I would suggest that you do so! Hope this helps!

 

Thank you for your reply. My hard drive grew 10gb from 288 to 298 because I reinstalled my operating system AGAIN and when I did I deleted the recovery drive along with the main drive and merged them together. I just noticed that everytime I installed something it would take up more space than it should. I don't know if windows was just creating a restore point at each driver I installed and that was taking up so much space. As far as what the Norton Support guy said was deleting temp files. I have CCleaner along with other cleaners. Is that what he was talking about deleting that would gain space or did it have something to do with starting windows in safe mode? If CCleaner or other cleaners will not delete those files where do I find them? Is it the fact of starting windows in safe mode and then deleting files that does the trick?

 

Hi Moto,

Standard memory housekeeping has always used clusters of sectors for symplicity. That means that even a one bit file would use a whole cluster. Directory would report 1 bit although a whole cluster was used. Size of the clusters are dependent on whether they are fat16, fat32, NTFS etc. and the size of the drive. Hope this helps clear up part of your questions.

Good Luck, Jim

 

Hi again Moto,

Sorry, That should have been "byte" and not "bit" in my last post.

Jim