Disk Space After Reinstalling a Game

I recently received a new Dell XPS M1530 laptop, and installed Neverwinter Nights 2 on it's 320 GB hard drive.

I made the mistake of fully updating it afterwards, before installing the expansion, so I went ahead and uninstalled it (there's supposed to be a certain way to install them to avoid issues). Restarted my computer a little while after and about a dozen Vista updates were installed.

After numerous attempts to reinstall the game, I kept receiving a DX installation error. Now, after checking my hard drive space, it seems like I have hard drive space missing (considerably more space taken up now than before). The game was fully uninstalled the first time, and I canceled the installation each subsequent time after receiving the Direct X error message. Usually in situations like this, the space gets redistributed immediately after the cancellation or a reboot.

I ran a program named WinDirStat, and it initially shows 226.1 GB free of the original 285 GB. After running the scan though, it displays that only 21.9 GB of space are being used, and not 59.4 GB like Windows Explorer shows.

Anyone notice something like this happening before? The only significant thing that I've done so far that contributed to this were these failed attempts at installing NWN 2. What can I do to get back the space that seems to not be available, or at least figure out where it is?

 

i would run something like crap cleaner and see if that helps. other than that, i would also search through your program files folder for files that you don't htink belongs there. Because the only thing that might be hard to uninstall are the changes to your registry which isn't that large, so there obviously is some erraneous files still floating around your harddrive. I would search for htem.

 

Run a chkdsk and see if that deletes orphaned files... sounds like something got corrupted to me.

 

Thanks for the ideas.

I ran the CCleaner program (ended up removing only 35 MB) & chkdsk at startup - but the numbers remained the same. There's still all of that space that's not restored, but showing up as being used in Windows Explorer.