Hard Drive Free Space Problems

I have two 149Gb (160Gb specified) Drives set up as a mirror RAID.

Vista says I have 103Gb free of 149Gb. I only have 21Gb in all the files
and folders (hidden and not), what is occupying the 25Gb?

Your file system could have free space marked as used. It happens. Open a
command prompt window and type:

chkdsk c: /f (assuming that Vista is installed to C being certain
to have the correct spaces where they are shown. Press enter. Type Y, then
ENTER to cause a boot time check of your hard drive. Exit the window.

Reboot.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!



"Bub's bud" <Bub's bud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:68E9E2CA-F2A8-4E22-A0C8-654B93A14A87@microsoft.com...
>I have two 149Gb (160Gb specified) Drives set up as a mirror RAID.
>
> Vista says I have 103Gb free of 149Gb. I only have 21Gb in all the files
> and folders (hidden and not), what is occupying the 25Gb?
>
>

Thanks, but it only gave me an extra 4Gb...

21Gb are still unaccounted for??


chkdsk does say there are 45Gb in 57,898 files - which differes from windows
explorer which says there are 21Gb in 59,879 files. - I am stumped.



"Richard Urban" wrote:

> Your file system could have free space marked as used. It happens. Open a
> command prompt window and type:
>
> chkdsk c: /f (assuming that Vista is installed to C being certain
> to have the correct spaces where they are shown. Press enter. Type Y, then
> ENTER to cause a boot time check of your hard drive. Exit the window.
>
> Reboot.
>
> --
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Urban
> Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
> (For email, remove the obvious from my address)
>
> Quote from George Ankner:
> If you knew as much as you think you know,
> You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
>
>
>
> "Bub's bud" <Bub's bud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:68E9E2CA-F2A8-4E22-A0C8-654B93A14A87@microsoft.com...
> >I have two 149Gb (160Gb specified) Drives set up as a mirror RAID.
> >
> > Vista says I have 103Gb free of 149Gb. I only have 21Gb in all the files
> > and folders (hidden and not), what is occupying the 25Gb?
> >
> >
>
>

In windows explorer properties for your C drive if it says you are using
21GB for 59,879 files how much space does it say is remaining?
"Bub''''s bud" <Bubsbud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news3AE4925-15D3-4B29-91B3-6EEC32560D86@microsoft.com...
> Thanks, but it only gave me an extra 4Gb...
>
> 21Gb are still unaccounted for??
>
>
> chkdsk does say there are 45Gb in 57,898 files - which differes from
> windows
> explorer which says there are 21Gb in 59,879 files. - I am stumped.
>
>
>
> "Richard Urban" wrote:
>
>> Your file system could have free space marked as used. It happens. Open a
>> command prompt window and type:
>>
>> chkdsk c: /f (assuming that Vista is installed to C being
>> certain
>> to have the correct spaces where they are shown. Press enter. Type Y,
>> then
>> ENTER to cause a boot time check of your hard drive. Exit the window.
>>
>> Reboot.
>>
>> --
>>
>>
>> Regards,
>>
>> Richard Urban
>> Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
>> (For email, remove the obvious from my address)
>>
>> Quote from George Ankner:
>> If you knew as much as you think you know,
>> You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
>>
>>
>>
>> "Bub's bud" <Bub's bud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
>> news:68E9E2CA-F2A8-4E22-A0C8-654B93A14A87@microsoft.com...
>> >I have two 149Gb (160Gb specified) Drives set up as a mirror RAID.
>> >
>> > Vista says I have 103Gb free of 149Gb. I only have 21Gb in all the
>> > files
>> > and folders (hidden and not), what is occupying the 25Gb?
>> >
>> >
>>
>>

It says there is 107 Gb free.

I gave up after two days - wiped my hard drive and reinstalled vista.
Everything seems okay now.

"JW" wrote:

> In windows explorer properties for your C drive if it says you are using
> 21GB for 59,879 files how much space does it say is remaining?
> "Bub''''s bud" <Bubsbud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news3AE4925-15D3-4B29-91B3-6EEC32560D86@microsoft.com...
> > Thanks, but it only gave me an extra 4Gb...
> >
> > 21Gb are still unaccounted for??
> >
> >
> > chkdsk does say there are 45Gb in 57,898 files - which differes from
> > windows
> > explorer which says there are 21Gb in 59,879 files. - I am stumped.
> >
> >
> >
> > "Richard Urban" wrote:
> >
> >> Your file system could have free space marked as used. It happens. Open a
> >> command prompt window and type:
> >>
> >> chkdsk c: /f (assuming that Vista is installed to C being
> >> certain
> >> to have the correct spaces where they are shown. Press enter. Type Y,
> >> then
> >> ENTER to cause a boot time check of your hard drive. Exit the window.
> >>
> >> Reboot.
> >>
> >> --
> >>
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >>
> >> Richard Urban
> >> Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
> >> (For email, remove the obvious from my address)
> >>
> >> Quote from George Ankner:
> >> If you knew as much as you think you know,
> >> You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> "Bub's bud" <Bub's bud@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> >> news:68E9E2CA-F2A8-4E22-A0C8-654B93A14A87@microsoft.com...
> >> >I have two 149Gb (160Gb specified) Drives set up as a mirror RAID.
> >> >
> >> > Vista says I have 103Gb free of 149Gb. I only have 21Gb in all the
> >> > files
> >> > and folders (hidden and not), what is occupying the 25Gb?
> >> >
> >> >
> >>
> >>
>
>
>

This happened to me as well...

"My hard drive has a capacity of 105 GB, (though it was supposed to have 120
GB...it always ends up like that when formatted) and has about 10 GB free.
(This is shown by looking at the status of the Drive in the drive's
properties window.) Therefore, there should be about 95 GB used in the
system. However, I opened the hard drive folder and added up the sizes of
all the folders there (Program Files, Windows, Users, etc.) and it came up
with only about 88 GB used. Therefore, it should come up as about 17 GB
free...what is accounting for this 7 GB discrepancy. I could imagine some
miscalculation errors accounting for a small amount of difference, but 7
Gigabytes is a bit too much...what's going on?"

I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista, which was probably a bad
idea...should I just wipe the Hard Drive and do a clean install as well?

Paging file, system restore files, indexing files...

"Jet Knife" <JetKnife@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:79D288FC-2DCC-4B89-ACCF-A08CD6458653@microsoft.com...
> This happened to me as well...
>
> "My hard drive has a capacity of 105 GB, (though it was supposed to have 120
> GB...it always ends up like that when formatted) and has about 10 GB free.
> (This is shown by looking at the status of the Drive in the drive's
> properties window.) Therefore, there should be about 95 GB used in the
> system. However, I opened the hard drive folder and added up the sizes of
> all the folders there (Program Files, Windows, Users, etc.) and it came up
> with only about 88 GB used. Therefore, it should come up as about 17 GB
> free...what is accounting for this 7 GB discrepancy. I could imagine some
> miscalculation errors accounting for a small amount of difference, but 7
> Gigabytes is a bit too much...what's going on?"
>
> I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista, which was probably a bad
> idea...should I just wipe the Hard Drive and do a clean install as well?

On a single partitioned drive your giving a lot of disk space to
system restore / shadow copies!
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/diskspacev.html

Run the vssadmin tool from a command prompt to find out how much.
Remember to right click on the command prompt to select "Run as
administrator".

Placing Vista in a smaller dedicated partition on the drive saves
disk space!


--


Hope this helps.

Gerry
~~~~
FCA
Stourport, England
Enquire, plan and execute
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

"Jet Knife" <JetKnife@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:79D288FC-2DCC-4B89-ACCF-A08CD6458653@microsoft.com...
> This happened to me as well...
>
> "My hard drive has a capacity of 105 GB, (though it was supposed
> to have 120
> GB...it always ends up like that when formatted) and has about 10
> GB free.
> (This is shown by looking at the status of the Drive in the
> drive's
> properties window.) Therefore, there should be about 95 GB used
> in the
> system. However, I opened the hard drive folder and added up the
> sizes of
> all the folders there (Program Files, Windows, Users, etc.) and it
> came up
> with only about 88 GB used. Therefore, it should come up as about
> 17 GB
> free...what is accounting for this 7 GB discrepancy. I could
> imagine some
> miscalculation errors accounting for a small amount of difference,
> but 7
> Gigabytes is a bit too much...what's going on?"
>
> I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista, which was probably a bad
> idea...should I just wipe the Hard Drive and do a clean install as
> well?

Hi,

You likely have a restore partition of 8-10GB, which explains the difference
in capacity. You can verify this in Disk Manager (diskmgmt.msc). The 7GB of
occupied space is likely to be the paging and hibernate files that are on
the root, not within the folders you added up. As you now are down to about
10% free space, you may find that things like defrag won't run fully or will
run slowly. Processes of this nature need free space (roughly 15% at a
minimum) to move files around. I would suggest that you consider moving
non-essential files to removable media.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP
http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/
Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

"Jet Knife" <JetKnife@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:79D288FC-2DCC-4B89-ACCF-A08CD6458653@microsoft.com...
> This happened to me as well...
>
> "My hard drive has a capacity of 105 GB, (though it was supposed to have
> 120
> GB...it always ends up like that when formatted) and has about 10 GB free.
> (This is shown by looking at the status of the Drive in the drive's
> properties window.) Therefore, there should be about 95 GB used in the
> system. However, I opened the hard drive folder and added up the sizes of
> all the folders there (Program Files, Windows, Users, etc.) and it came up
> with only about 88 GB used. Therefore, it should come up as about 17 GB
> free...what is accounting for this 7 GB discrepancy. I could imagine some
> miscalculation errors accounting for a small amount of difference, but 7
> Gigabytes is a bit too much...what's going on?"
>
> I upgraded my laptop from XP to Vista, which was probably a bad
> idea...should I just wipe the Hard Drive and do a clean install as well?