Missing 10GB's, need some assistance

Hi

I very rarely ask for help but this time I really do need help.

On my PC I am missing roughly 10 gigabytes of hard drive space.

I have a 40GB hard drive and at the moment it says:

Free Space: 3.66GB

Which means I am using roughly 36GB

But after going around and tallying up as many files as I possibly can I have come to a very strong conclusion that I am only using roughly 27GB.

The only possibility is that My Documents has been duplicated or Windows is using a bulk of that. But that's almost unheard of.

I am using XP.

Any ideas guys? I'm in a rut and I am in desperate need for this extra 10GB

Thanks

PS If the answer is blatantly obvious, say so. I accept the shame of being dumb and not figuring this one out

 

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hmm
temp internet folder and temp have been emptied?
type "find duplicate files download" in google and try the apps
even so, there is no way that you would even recover a hundred megs doing this so .........

 

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A friend of mine had the same problem recently... he formatted that partition, problem solved. He was using XP too... but an illegal version.

I hope it's not an XP flaw.

 

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Did you check the fdisk and make sure you didn't make your partition only 30 gigs?

 

turn the system restore off, and that will sava some harddisk space.

 

By default, Windows XP creates a restore point after installing Windows XP, once every 10 hours that Windows XP is running, or every 24 hours. It also creates a restore point when you install a new program, or install an update to Windows XP. And you can manually create restore points at any time.

You can end up with a number of restore point files, which can be large.

To Disable System Restore, go to the Control Panel ('Start > Control Panel') and double click the 'System' icon. Then:

Click on the 'System Restore' tab on the system applet.
Check mark 'turn off system restore on all drives' to turn off system restore on the system.
Uncheck the box to enable System Restore monitoring on the system.
Click OK when done.

 

Okay, lemme reply to those who've helped

Spookz: I downloaded a program that look for duplicate files, it found no major ones that would explain the massive hole

testify: I have and it isn't

Anian: OH MY SWEET LORD, it was using roughly 5GB's of space which it is now deleting. Wow, I never even knew this existed! Thanks

To even who has helped, I thank you and appreciate it

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Now I'm off to Defrag my drive

Thanks again

 

That is downright INSANE. Isn't there a limit it sets when you install XP as to how big the recovery points can get? If there is I sure can't see it being 5GB.

 

Yeah, you can set a limit. I wish I had taken a snapshot now. But it was 5GB, well, okay 4.96 but rounded up that's 5GB!! I couldn't believe it. I've also stopped the MicroSoft Autoupdates as that has to be doing some damage too.

 

And people still insist on using Windows XP. It is 2000, 98 SE, or a non-windows operating system, period

 

Nah it's WinXP and Win2k. Period. The only way linux is a decent operating system is if you build it from the console up. Linux installs put way too much crap on the systems that aren't even needed. Who needs 30 different text editors? Win98 SE is better than WinME, but not by much. Win98 and WinME traded off boot loading times for stability. Neither are to my satisfaction.

WIN2k ALL THE WAY!

 

The only reason to use XP would be to use XP 64-bit edition, assuming you have a 64-bit processor(s)

Let's go over Windows XP:

Very stressful on hardware

Spyware

Forced features

Security holes

Must inform microsoft after a certain period of time if you change hardware

Required registeration

And now this

The only problem with 98 SE is it requires tweaking for it's original setup to improve stability and prevent memory leaks. That and it requires more updates to stay on top of current things.

2000 Professional with service pack 2 is good aside from it's few bugs and the fact that it lacks support for older 16-bit MS-DOS based proggies.

BTW there are other operating systems aside from Linux and Unix. BSD and OS/2 are a couple of examples.

 

But you can turn features off so it runs faster. This is a good thing.

No worse than any other commercial OS I've dealt with.

? what do you mean by that.

Again, no worse than any other OS I've dealt with. All the favourite opensource tools have regular patchwes issued for the deadly 'buffer overflow problem".

Yeh, real killer that one. I've had XP Home edition installed since it came out. In that time I've added a CD-RW, more memory, new sound cards (twice), new disks, changed the CD and Monitor, added web cams, firewire and Sony Digicam feeds, 3 modems ... In short just about anything that can change, changed. XP did not complain once.

Two weeks ago my MoBo fried. Upgraded to a 1.8Ghz Athlon/FSB33 & RDRAM while I was at it. Eventually this XP feature kicked in. The system rebooted and said, "There has been a significant hardware change since it was first built. You must re-register with MS. Do you wish to do so now?". I answered yes, some data passed between me and MS, that was it. Systems worked fine for 3 weeks since and no money was required.

Which is fine, In the commercial world, if you upgrade a CPU all the IT vendors demand you buy upgraded licenses. There's nothing new there,

All commercial OS's demand this.

Do you mean the restore point? Any good system manager should take a system backup/snapshot before installing anything. Just in case. MS are doing it for you.

This utility has twice got me out of trouble due to bad 3rd party drivers.

OS/2 is no longer supported, by anyone. Your average homeluser could never install FreeBSD. Most wimper at Linux. Most, all, flavours of Unix are commercial and do not run on Intel chipsets in PC's. I.E. Tru64, Solaris, AIX & HP-UX to name a few.

Which leaves you with Windows, Linux and MAC OSX in reality.

Me, I prefer OpenVMS but you need serious hardware for that. Win2K with dual Itanium 32's and an emulator or a 1Ghz Alpha EV68. Better yet, a cluster of 2048 such machines.

 

Some of the things that are stressful on hardware you can disable, but XP still takes away more than any previous home user OS

None of the previous versions of Windows have spyware like XP, though 2000 with service pack 3 and ME border on some of the newer attempts to gain confidental information without authorization.

By forced features I mean you can't control certain aspects of your software and GUI that you could in previous versions of Windows. There are different areas to this. Some of these problems can be solved with tweaking yes, but not all of them. I am not going to get into specifics now.....

The Java scripting hole, back button error in IE, and known for quite some time opening in Outlook express, were present when Windows XP went retail. Sure the updates and patches fix this, but microsoft certainly lived up to its claim when it publically anounced that "Windows XP would be the most secure operating system in the world, virtually uncrackable" The hole in Outlook Express was very miserable because it was known long ago in the past before XP was released, another example of sloppy work in an OS

Don't know about XP Home edition, but I know of many cases where people have to inform microsoft online if they are changing hardware, or have had a piece of hardware for a long time and have not gotten newer drivers.

XP has been the only version of Windows to require online registration. Do your homework

As for the restore feature, I think it is up to the user to make sure they have a good software setup and keep their PC healthy. If people don't wish for this feature, it is just another thing they will have to take time to disable.

None of us on sciforums are dealing with mainframes in our home/personal life. Maybe in the business field, yes, as your name suggest by IT gopher - but not at our desk at home; maybe in some big building with billions of dollars floating around. This type of discussion really doesn't have much revelence here. No one around here has the money for that kind of thing, and even if we did, we wouldn't have the space to physically store it, the resources to order/purchase it, or the technical knowledge to work it. Most of us work with desktop PCs or entry level servers at best, at least at home. But anyhow

I am talking about standardized stuff here, not personalized OS' for specific machines that really aren't even "computers"

As for IBM's OS/2, it is not used frequently no, maybe about as much as those systems you mentioned above are at home - it is mostly by people using older programs and have specific tasks they wish to accomplish, but they have held an OS/2 Covention Conference within the past year.

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,763064,00.asp?kc=ETTH102099TX1K0100486

What do you think you can get from XP that you can't get from 2000?

 

several things:

your drive may be clipped at 32 gigs by the bios inability to address any lrger. remove the clip, updat your bios. process destroys contents of hard disk

your drive is improperly partitioned. repartition drive. process may destroy contents, use partition magic 8 and resize the partition

the drive is a damaged ntfs volume that is not reporting the free space correctly. run a full scandisk on it. or convert it to fat32 and defrag, thens candisk it

buy another drive! fs, a gig is less than a dollar these days. no excuses!

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Thor...first of all (though had you taken heed already and have done this) set your restore point limit to under a gig...mine was at default to 6.9 gigs..but i changed it to 4.4 gigs because i can afford to...but 32 gigs? i recommend a bigger drive. Softwares today are space hoggers, specially games these days - Final Fantasy XI requires 4gigs alone......4 gigs . Get a bigger drive. I think Maxtor sells a 250 gig now but you can get a 120 gig or a 100gig (that's a standard these days in almost all pc's)