3

I have a Win7 laptop with a 750Gig C: drive. It came partitioned with 714Gig usable from manufacturer. I installed programs, music files, etc up to 285 gigs. As of a few weeks ago it showed 285 Gigs. Two weeks of house guests later and it shows HD is full. I deleted some files but it still shows 652 Gigs on this drive while there are only 285 Gigs on drive. Relevant details:

  1. I am Administrator on laptop and have fair knowledge of what I am doing.
  2. I did not restore from backup, restore from mirror, upgrade HD's or anything else that would have touched the partition structure. Just daily use as imaging machine and web.
  3. I have checked partitions under disk administrator - no change, still partitioned with 714Gigs usable.
  4. Have looked through computer C drive by hand showing Hidden files and folders - no change.
  5. I have used JDisk Report to double check - it shows I have only 285 Gigs on C drive.
  6. I triple checked with TreeSize run as Administrator and it also shows 285 Gigs on C drive - yet Windows 7 still shows almost full.
  7. I used Windows 7 Utilities to Check for Disk Errors, and Defragged the drive. No errors shown and no change after Defrag.
slhck
  • 235,242
Chris Kelly
  • 55

5 Answers5

5

Use TreeSizeFree and run it as admin (this is very important to see hidden/system files and folders).

Now you see a nice overview of what is using the HDD space:

enter image description here

magicandre1981
  • 99,606
1

Check your system restore points. If they build up, you won't see them but they can eat a very large portion of the drive. You can configure your restore settings to control how much disk space they are allowed to use:

  1. Click right on computer and select properties
  2. Click System protection
  3. Select configure
  4. Choose max usage to limit how much drive space is allowed.
Larry Goldstein
  • 11
0

You can try sdelete http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897443.aspx to delete information from "unallocated" space. This worked for me on a 800 GB server that was "full", but only 650 was actually being used. This happens because as files are "deleted", they aren't deleted, the space is marked as "unallocated" (the deleted information is still there until new information overwrites the "deleted" data). sdelete is a MS toll that removes the information, and marks the locations as free.

Ben Plont
  • 422
-2

In my case microsoft sql server has a database that uses 150gb of disk space. windows explorer, windirstat, treesizefile etc. programs can't show the ".ldf" file of this database. Because owner of the file was MSSQLSERVER user and Administrator accounts don't have permission to read.

ibkaya
  • 1
-2

My friend told me that his disk D: has shown nearly full but there is little data, because he chose disk D: to make backups.

He had turned on the schedule, so I turned off the schedule and cleaned all the backups. After that, I deleted the system image file.

Now everything is ok. Hope this will help you.

mveroone
  • 1,928
wai phyo
  • 1