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70GB Windows drive, but only 40GB can be accounted for. Why?


Anagoge
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I have a 70GB partition with a three day old version of Windows 7 on it and no other installed applications. Currently, I have 6GB free on it, which makes little sense as I know that Windows is not over 60GB in size. This free space is getting smaller and smaller and I don't know why.

To try and see why, I made all hidden files visible, selected everything in C:\ and looked at the properties. Windows takes a moment to calculate the total size of everything and it comes to just 40GB. That means that somewhere, there is 30GB hiding and not being accounted for even when I tell Windows to tell me the size of everything.

As the space continues to get smaller every day, there is obviously something writing to the drive and using quite a lot of space, but as Windows doesn't tell me what, it's hard to figure out what the problem is. I know that stuff like system restore points use up a fair amount of space, but as I said, when I add together the entire contents of the drive, the whole thing only comes to 40GB, not the 70GB it should be. If I go to Computer, it says there's just 6GB left.

Could you please help?

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WinDirStat will give one an idea of whats on a drive with pretty colors to boot. This is a link to the portable version; install the app to any created folder and run the .exe (as administrator) within the folder. Wait for the scan to finish and one should be able to identify drive content block-by-block.

WinDirStat.jpg

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Thanks both for your help. bludgard, I used WinDirStat and found my hiberfil.sys file was using up a lot of space. I've now corrected that which has let me regain some space. However, this doesn't solve my initial problem of why I can't see all of the space on my drive. Any ideas?

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Selecting everything in C would still select everything in all folders so that particular option doesn't really have any bearing unfortunately. Perhaps if I show you what I'm seeing, you'll understand a bit better:

WBfTZ.jpg

There is a difference between the total drive size shown in the bottom left and the total drive size in Properties.

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