Strange Hard Drive Problem

[Tom84]

Strange Hard Drive Problem - Lenovo backup!

Been working on a customers laptop today because he's said it's been running slow and he got a low disc space icon pop up, well I looked at it today and windows is indeed reporting that he's only got 5gb left free of his 120gb HDD.

Now this laptop is almost brand new so I found it highly doubtful that he'd filled all that space up so I downloaded treesize and in that it's only reporting that 34gb has been taken up yet it does acknowledge it as a 120gb HDD.

Any idea's as to why windows is reporting a lack of space but treesize isn't and mores to the point where I can locate where all this space has been taken up?

Ta

 

[Tom84]

Just ran that program (it's actually a little better than treesize) however like treesize it's also reporting that only 32gb is being used

Possibly a faulty HDD?

 

[Tom84]

It's a lenovo (IBM) laptop and yep I've run spyware checks, adware checks, virus checks, disk defrag's, chkdsk's, turned system restore off and at the moment in the process of removing any backups Lenovo's own software has created.

Still highly doubt it's going to retrieve the 70gb of missing space though.

I'm convinced the HDD is faulty.

 

[Tom84]

Ok plot thickens,

I just told windows to un-hide all protected system files and file extensions and at first look a select all and properties did indeed report back 93gb's worth of date HOWEVER it hasn't reported it again since

This is truly weird.

 

[Tom84]

Eventually found the route of it, with Lenovo laptops they include their own Restore and Recovery backup software now whilst installed the hidden file was showing 0 files in the root directory but after uninstalling the software and forcing ownership of the folder it then revealed a massive 70gb's worth of data within

So deleted all of what was in that and hey presto all sorted