Hard drive size decrease after Vista 64 bit update.

Recently my brand new studio 17 updated, about a week later I noticed that 50GB had gone missing! I of course called tech support to see if they could help (good luck) after spending hours on the phone they could not really solve the issue, asides from doing a factory reset.

Now again I am having this issue again, once Vista updated it is slowly eating away hard drive space. There is currently 31.4GB being used (yes, this includes all hidden files) on a 450GB hard drive, yet the system reports only 402 GB free space. Each day it decreases about 2-4 GBs.

Tech support is blaming the OS, yet they have no soultion for the issue and refuse to call me back at several stated times. It seems to me that Dell has their thumbs up their asses on this one and just puts a band aid on the problem 'Sir you should turn off Vista Updates' ? That is no solution to the problem!

The computer hasn't been used in a few days, yet it constantly loses GBs each day I check it!

 

Sounds odd,I'd get in contact with microsoft as well,Or post on their forums anyway

 

The space is likely being eaten up by a backup service called Shadow Copy and System Restore; both are used whenever changes are made to the system, and neither are given limitations as to how much HDD space they can utilize.

Click on Computer > Right-click desired disk > Properties > Disk Cleanup > click the second tab (may be called advanced options) > delete all but the most recent shadow copies and system restore points.

 

This sounds like the Shadow Copy at work. Basically what is does it, before an uninstallation or installation of anything (includes updates) or after booting, Vista will automatically create a 'copy' of folders and files that are in the computer. This will take up a lot of space, typically maxed out at 15% of your hard disk space.

To delete these copies, go to "Computer", right-click on your primary partition, choose "Properties", then "Disk Cleanup". Then choose the "More Options" tab, then click the "Clean up..." button that is inside the "System Restore and Shadow Copy" Section. Wait for a while and you're done!

To completely turn off Shadow Copy, I think all you have to do is turn off System Restore. Go to the Control Panel, then to Backup and Restore Center. Choose "Create a Restore Point or Change Settings". The button to disable System Restore is somewhere in there. (Sorry I can only help you until this far )

 

Usually if alot of space disapears suddenly it would be useful to re-install the SATA driver, which is downloadable from intel or who-ever manufactured it, but this sounds a bit stranger, there are several things that i would look into before contacting microsoft and one of those is how much space the volume shadow copy service is using, it is usually 5% but because you have such a big HDD that could mean quite a lot of space so to set this right what i would do is go to the command prompt and type in these commands in order (but remember to start cmd as administrator):

1)"vssadmin list shadowstorage". Type that without quotes and it will tell you how much is being used for this service and becuase of your hdd size i would expect it to be about 20-30GB

2)"vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /Maxsize=5GB". Where it says C: you will need to substitute that for the system partition and you can also set the amount to what you want but 5GB is about as much as most people need.

After those steps go to windows explorer and see if the hard drive size has changed back to what it should be, but this could require a reboot to see the changes.

If the problem is still there after you have tried this then repost in this thread as there are a few more things that you could try

 

Could also have been SP2.

Some people have said this is giving back HDD space..

 

SP2 only gives back HDD space when you run the cmpcln command (I think that was the command anyway).

 

I didn't have to run the command and I gained a good 5 or 6GB I believe...

 

Let me start off by saying, I did post a thread on the Dell forum their response to my thread was to close it. As for support from Microsoft, I don't feel like paying them 59 dollars for something when the computer is only two-three weeks old.

I did what Bog and BondEternal posted and it did help me gain back all the missing space! What I still do not understand is why would Vista do this after the update. It was pointed out, and I knew that it takes up space before the install but how would I keep losing 2-4GBs per day after the install was complete?

Snoopy thanks as well for your tips, but only 2GB was being used by that, though the max was set to 67!

Dell needs some guys like you, not people that do not know how to answer the simplest of questions. They were telling me that Vista must have installed a bad file which was slowly eating up the space.

Anyway I would like to thank everyone who tired to help me out, you guys are better than Dell .

 

I recently downloaded SP2 and installed it, and it freed up over 20GB of hard drive space.

Pity it's slowly being eaten away by Shadow Copy or Back Up and Restore Center...

 

OK, perhaps I should amend my previous statement. SP2 only gave you HDD space back by clearing your disk cache / vss. If you had altered the amount of space allowed by this using something like VssAdmin then you'd not have noticed such a big improvement in disk space.