Hard Drive Space Problems

[The4th1]

Hi - I'm new, I don't know where to post this so I guess I'll post it here.

My Hard Drive is 250gb, my profile says that it is taking up 91gb of that space, I should have 159gb free yet, as far as I have encountered, everything else tells me I have 53gb free(and this goes down a GB or two every so often)
http://h.imagehost.org/0065/wtf2.png

I believe this problem may have occurred when I defragged my Hard Drive with Auslogics Disk Defrag and then when I pressed "Defrag & Optimize".

[Sick Willie]

Your profile is just what is in your user directory. It does't include the Windows directory, Program Files, etc., so there will/can be a large disparity.

As an example, on one of my machines, my profile is only 3 GB. The partition it's on is 80 GB and there's only 30 GB free.

Welcome to the forums.

[The4th1]

I see. I've checked both the WINDOWS file and the Program files... file, It still should be more than what is being displayed.

[Spankin Partier]

You will need to check all the directories on the drive. But even still you'll notice the numbers will never add up.

Here's why: Your hard drive is divided up into thousands of sections by the file system. Some of these sections are used to store the locations and file names of your actual data. Also if you have many small files, then even though they may only take up a small portion of one of these sections, the rest of the section becomes unusable to any other file. But these two variations should only account for a very small percentage of lost space (probably 5% max).

What you should do is right click on where it says 'My Disk ( C: )' and select properties. There you should see a full brake down of how much space is being used.

You'll also notice that even though your Hard Drive is a 250GB, your computer says its 255GB. The definition of a GB changes depending on what you're looking at. Why they never went to a single standardized version is beyond me.

[wonkanoby]

more like 235gb

[Sick Willie]

Originally Posted by The4th1

I see. I've checked both the WINDOWS file and the Program files... file, It still should be more than what is being displayed.

Thus the "etc." in the 2nd sentence of my first post.

[wonkanoby]

if you have any restore points set they can take a huge percentage of the drive

[The4th1]

Originally Posted by wonkanoby

if you have any restore points set they can take a huge percentage of the drive

Yes, that seem to have done the trick. Thank you all for your help

[Sick Willie]

To revisit this, this: http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/ is a decent program for finding that missing disk space. It found a McAfee 76 GB quarantine directory for me that Windows wouldn't reveal on its own.

[MrFuriousX]

I kinda like Spacemonger myself... you can move copy and delete right from within the program.