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Hard drive not adding up right...

yh125d

yh125d

Diamond Member
I'm wanting to shrink my OS/APP partition so I can add one for data, but for some reason my HD is showing as 170gb used on the current partition. When I add up everything on c:\, I can only find 32. About 11 for windows, 8 in program files, 12 in Users, and another couple spread out. I have hidden files showing, so I should be seeing it all, but it's just not adding up. Is there something I'm missing here?

It's a fresh install of Vista Home prem, with a handful of apps and a couple games loaded. No way it should be taking 170gb.
 
What does disk management show the size of the drive as? Something has to be eating up space, perhaps the swap file?
 
Disk Management shows it as one big 900 some odd gb partition (which it is), with 170gb used (which is wrong). Also, if I try to shrink the volume, it will only let me resize the partition by 225gb smaller
 
Actually that sounds about right,,, by default Vista uses 15% of harddrive for system restore reserved space,... which on 1Tb drive is about 135-140GB you can see 30GB approx + 140GB system restore reserved space = ~170GB!!!!

Nice article about it and how to adjust it,... that should take care of your problem,... since you dont need 140GB of restore space and 5gb should do (10-20GB if you really want), fix that and you will see the space magically available again
http://www.vista4beginners.com...tem-Restore-Space-Used

start-run-cmd
type
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=1GB
where c corresponds to drive letter and 1Gb is an example of size (300mb is smallest allowed)

EDIT - I must admit this was one of the more annoying little details about Vista when I first installed it,... and to adjust it is not as easy as WinME or WinXP (as well as using more by default),.. hopefully that changes in the final version of Win 7

There is also a registry key for it,... just don't have that saved on my ready favs, the command line sometimes gives issues,...

Oh yeah and last point,.. if you did something like I did and manipulated your Vista to be on a different drive letter than the default of c (in my case D) you need to make corresponding adjustments,.. and adjust it for each partition you may have system restore running on,... typically I just have it on my "vista drive" and turn it off for others,.. but say you subdivide your 1TB drive into 4, then adjust through the previous command just the c drive,... you still have a lot of wasted (reserved) space on the other partitions,...
 
Originally posted by: scruffypup
Actually that sounds about right,,, by default Vista uses 15% of harddrive for system restore reserved space,... which on 1Tb drive is about 135-140GB you can see 30GB approx + 140GB system restore reserved space = ~170GB!!!!

Nice article about it and how to adjust it,... that should take care of your problem,... since you dont need 140GB of restore space and 5gb should do (10-20GB if you really want), fix that and you will see the space magically available again
http://www.vista4beginners.com...tem-Restore-Space-Used

EDIT - I must admit this was one of the more annoying little details about Vista when I first installed it,... and to adjust it is not as easy as WinME or WinXP (as well as using more by default),.. hopefully that changes in the final version of Win 7

There is also a registry key for it,... just don't have that saved on my ready favs, the command line sometimes gives issues,...
Click to expand...

AHA! Thank you very much! I limited it down to 1GB and it is reporting correctly now
 
Kind of makes me wonder if I can save some space on my laptop, which seems continually overflowing with my media
 
Hey guys, I tried this and it worked great for my C drive. Thanks!

For some reason, it won't work for my 2nd hard drive (the 250gb WDC.) I'm missing about 40 gigs on it but vssadmin says it can't find that volume. Could there be something OTHER than this eating those 40 gigs?
 
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