Missing hard disk space..?

ChrissyT88 · 3 Aug 2008 at 13:23

Hi,

I tried doing a search, but couldnt find anything that relevant. I built a new pc about a month ago using a samsung 640 gb hard disk and vista 64. When formated, this gives my nearly 600 gb. I have recently copied a lot of music to my computer using lossless compression, and have finally got round to installing my most played games etc. However, i was a little shocked to see that that windows explorer reports that i have used 200 gb of disk space.

However, when actually selecting all of the files on the hard disk, there is only a little over 100 gb of files - this seems a little odd to me. I thought it could be a bug with windows explorer, but using the treemap software windirstat confirms that i only have 114 gb of files on the disk. I have enabled the view hidden files option via control panel, so i am not sure it can be this. Is there anything else that could be causing this (pretty big) difference? Do files take up more space on the disk than their file size?

It may be worth mentioning that this is actually the second time i have installed vista. I reinstalled after overclocking to ensure stability, and selected the delete partition option in the setup, which it promptly did, although it showed no signs of formatting the drive. Could it be that the old windows files are still on the disk?

Thanks very much for reading, any help would be appreciated.

ChrissyT88 · 3 Aug 2008 at 14:26

Would these not show up when selecting every file on the drive and on the treemap? Certainly the page file shows up on the treemap, although running it again does not show any restore files.. perhaps system restore is the cause?

ChrissyT88 · 3 Aug 2008 at 15:57

Thanks guys - i will look into it a bit further. I hope there isnt anything really wrong - would be a royal PITA. Im pretty sure its not the pagefile as this shows up in the treemap, and to be honest, ive put too much stuff on here now to go through another format... The recycle bin is pretty empty (matter of MBs), and hibernate is not enabled, but will try disabling system restore.

EDIT: System restore is off - 100 Gb of extra free space! Thanks guys - im slightly embarrassed that it was something quite so simple, but i presumed that any restore files would be present within the c drive directories or at least show up on the drive treemap. Anyhow, i think i'll leave it enabled, but it is good to know that i am not just 'missing' hard disk space.

ChrissyT88 · 3 Aug 2008 at 16:39

I turn the machine off every night (completely off, not sleep/hibernate), so it had a fresh start this morning, but i think the problem is due to system restore. As i said, i feel slightly embarrassed that it was something so trivial, i just presumed that the system restore data would show up upon analysing the disk.

Once again, thanks for the help sp00n, helmut and burnsy.