Strange Hard Drive Problem

Tom84 · 3 Apr 2008 at 14:14

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

bledd · 3 Apr 2008 at 15:34

jDiskreport awesome tool, you need java installed first (java runtime)
use ccleaner slim to clear out temp files etc

disable system restore, might be TONS of data in there

Tom84 · 3 Apr 2008 at 15:56

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 :confused:

Possibly a faulty HDD?

bledd · 3 Apr 2008 at 16:24

disable system restore? also, i remember from a pc ages ago, norton keeps its own recycle bin (nice one symantec :rolleyes:

) which clogs up machines

give us a screenshot of disk management, might not be fully formatted (empty space)

after disabling system restore, run chkdsk on the drive too

Solnyshko · 3 Apr 2008 at 16:27

Could be a strange installation routine on first usage.

As per my problem (http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=17858569)

What make is it? If it's Samsung I know you are obliged to partition the drive during OS setup and first use. The second partition also has a hidden phantom mini partition that apparently holds ‘essential recovery data’. My girlfriend's appraoch was to just hit enter on every prompt and ended up with the drive partitioned into two equal 72GB slices. It appears once this has been done it is nigh impossible to repartition, short of a complete reformat.

Now that I have upgraded to Vista, I’ve lost 50% of total capacity, with the second partition not even visible when booting from Gnome Gparted boot disk

Tom84 · 3 Apr 2008 at 17:22

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 · 4 Apr 2008 at 09:49

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 :confused:

This is truly weird.

bledd · 4 Apr 2008 at 10:14

unhide all files & system protected, then run jdiskreport on it, i'm finding it hard to see what's going wrong here mate..

screenshot of disk management?

Tom84 · 4 Apr 2008 at 19:15

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 :eek:

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