What is using the free space?

Question

Hi, I hope someone can help me with this one. 1 of the guys at my work has got a "lenovo R61" laptop. The guy asked me to have a look at it for him as it was very slow. I ended up fixing the problem but found something else. He has got a 160GB hard drive in the laptop. If I right click on his drive in "My Computer" it shows "122GB - Used Space" and "20.6GB - Free Space". Now the problem is that he removed all his personal items from his laptop to free up space. If I go to "My Computer" and open his "C drive", highlight everything in "C drive" and select properties to view the size of all the content it only shows "45.8GB". I opened "Disk Management" and found that there is an extra partition on the drive for the "Lenovo ThinkVantage" backups but it has only got a capacity of "5.54GB". If I work it out more or less then about +/- 80GB is used but there is no files listed. The Recycle Bin is empty. There is no hidden files that is bigger than 1GB. What is using the free space?

Please Help

Answer 1

Typically the first thing I would do is run a chkdsk /f to ensure there are no disk errors. There can be allocated and lost files that are chewing up space. The directory size entries can be wrong, etc.



If that didn't correct it then I would use DU (http://technet.microsoft.com/en-ca/sysinternals/bb896651.aspx) to determine where the space was going.

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Not sure why the link fails

Try www.sysinternals.com

Go to the disk section and grab DU.



There are a lot of good tools here FYI. They are freeware and you don't install them.

Answer 2

Maybe he has system restore or virtual memory set really high or there is a bad sector on the HD.

But here is the thing; if he has all his personal stuff removed, why not reformat and do a clean install of the OS. That would remove the mystery, and he would start off with a new OS. (There is just the annoyance of reinstalling all the personal programs though.)

Answer 3

check out the control panel and go into add remove programs and look at the programs there to see what is taking up space.