Hard Drive showing much less capacity than it really has...

Hey folks...got a VAIO with a 250gb hard-drive...put about 70gb of stuff on from my external drive (photos, videos, music, etc.)...about a week later, had to do a complete disk recovery or whatever it is where you enter the CD and start all over again...well, since it wiped the hard-drive, or so I thought, I re-loaded my 70gb of stuff a second time, yet when I open up "Computer," the C: shows 140gb of used space...I've done several searches to try to see if a duplicate copy of each file is hidden somewhere, to no avail...I mean I still have about 85-90gb of free space, but I'm thinking there is 70gb that is really at my disposal, but I just need someone a whole lot more savvy than I am to figure this out...any suggestions?

 

Try using a bootable utility that runs independent of Windows. You can use a 'live' Linux CD like Knoppix (download from this link) or a PE disc like the UBCD4Win (download from this link; how-to build the CD info at this link). You can use either CD to browse the drive and see what's really going on. The UBCD4Win has numerous utilities that should be extremely helpful. You can also try the freeware program Scanner (direct download from this link) which scans your drive and displays drive usage in a pie graph (see screen shot). As you move the mouse pointer in to areas in the pie graph, the top line in the Scanner window displays the path to the corresponding files/folders and how much space is used; just look at the screen shot and you'll see what I'm talking about.
I hope this helps!
:-D

 

I tried the freeware Scanner program, and it helped - kind of. It shows 137gb used; yet when I mouse over the areas displayed, it shows a total of 104.1gb used...I'm thoroughly confused now, but I do feel a bit better.