Disapearing HDD Space...

[L337Llama]

I own a t60 with a 100 ( 88gb avaiable when formatted) gb hdd. Recently, I had about 50 odd gb free, and yesterday it turned into 15 gb. I didnt download or install anything. I added up all the folders in the root of the hdd, and was short roughly 30 gb, and I dont know whats taking up that 30 gb. I'm really not sure what to do, and id mildly prefer to not reformat the hdd, since this is a sata hdd and windows xp lacks sata drivers, as far as i know. Any suggestions would be greatly, greatly apreciated. Thank you for your time.

 

[daveybrat]

Do you use aol??

 

[montag451]

Try a utility to see if there is something wrong:


http://www.google.com/search?c...pera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

 

[travisray2004]

Im supposing that you have a laptop with a sata internal hdd. If it isnt a raid controller for the hdd, then you should be able to do clean install. But, that still wont help you find out where those GIGS of data got to. Do you have other users enabled on the computer? Sometimes when you are at the root of the drive, you cant see all whats in Doc&Settings folder because you do not have permission to access, so there you cant get a file size. Do you use this computer to edit videos/pictures? Play games?

 

[montag451]

Oh yes, nice one travisray.
Great point.
Also - have you got 'display hidden/system files' enabled in explorer's options?

 

[dbailey]

check the recycle bin as well.. maybe someone used your computer, and deleted their porn, but never emptied out the recycle bin...

 

[L337Llama]

Man, this makes me wanna pull my hair out.

I'm the only one using the computer. The recyle bin was emptied. I ended up burning some stuff onto DVD's, and went up to having a few more GB, but now its hovering around 13 no matter what I remove. Like anything I clean up adds space for a bit, but then it goes back to 13 gb. I ran the chkdsk, went into safe mode as an admind, mad sure hiddne files were visible, and still can't find anything. I ran a virus scanner, a defrager, spybot, and adaware, and still nothing.

I know this sounds like a stupid problem, but I can't figure out what is taking up space and staying invisible and such. Eventually, I will have to do a clean install of windows, but I dont wanna invest in an external floppy cause Microsoft cant put a few measly sata drivers in Windows XP. Not to mention it doesnt technically solve this mystery... Thank you for the suggestions, and if anything else pops up, let me know and I'll try it.

 

[Trashman]

Same thing happening to this guy------>LINK

 

[Oakenfold]

Try Windirstat
That may help in determining what's going on.

 

[vaca232]

I had a similar thing happen t my computer. I forget how much space I had free, it was at least a few gigabytes. When I turned the computer on all the free space was there, then over time as the computer was on the free space shrank down to nothing, but all of the files on the hard drive remained the same size. Whenever I restarted, I had all the free space back.

In task manager, in the I/O writes column, it was System that was eating the hard drive. The space just disappeared and wasn't in any file.

If you restart do you have your free space back? I wish I could offer some help..I ended up reinstalling Windows