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Where is the rest of my HDD?

Z

Zoinks

Senior member
Windows 7 reports my 596GB hdd having 475 used and 121 free. Ok, nothing mysterious there. So I'm trying to free up some space and I'm clicking properties of the root folders and they don't add up to 475 GB. I tried a program called Folder Size and it tells me c: has 328 GB in it which is about what I added up manually with the folder properties.

I know there is a difference in file size and size used on disk. But the biggest chunk of space is used by family photos - 129GB. The difference between actual size and size used is <<1%.

Any idea how to find my missing 150GB?
 
I bet it's being used by System Restore and Shadow Copy. If your system's stable, you can disable SR as a fact-finding step, which will wipe out existing System Restore points and free up the space.
 
I used disk cleanup's 'more options' to remove all but the most recent restore point. I'll give disabling SR a try but it should never take up this much space.

Disk manager lists C: as Disk2 with a 100MB System Reserved partition and a 596.07 GB healthy boot, page file, crash dump, primary partition.
 
Prior to turning off SR it reports using 1.51GB. Turning it off looks like it freed up about that much.

Max usage is capped at 9.3 GB (2&#37😉.
 
More testing with Folder Size:
C: is as above
F: is has 140 GB of data by folder size but windows says 279 used, 317 free. (also a 596 GB drive.
E: (which I think is an old PATA drive, but I have to open up to check) reports 233 GB in both folder size and windows.

Is it some kind of SATA related problem?
 
I have the perfect program for you: Sequoia View

It visualizes used space on your hard drive as rectangles of varied size. The larger the rectangles, the larger the file or directory. Hope that helps.
 
Sequoia View is much like folder size except it displays the results graphically. It doesn't really help me resolve why windows reports I've used a lot more disk space than the sum of all my files.
 
do you have view hidden files enabled?
do you see hibernation file, system restore files, page file?
size that files occupy on disk is usually larger than size of files due to block size.
 
It could be hidden/restricted files. If you don't have permissions to a folder (some sort of system folder or other users folder, for example) Windows-based disk usage utils won't be able to see the file space used. Afterall, if you can't see what's in the directory you can't tell what's being used.

To circumvent this without nuking permissions, you can use a Linux live CD and the tools therein to view the disk usage. This will let you dig into otherwise hands-off areas.

Also, make sure that you verify on your tools/reports with space used on disk (kinda like postmortem mentioned). If you're using 16KB blocks, for example, a 1-byte file will still occupy 16KB on disk.
 
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