"Disappearing HDD"

Hello all, I am not as computer savvy as all of you so I ask for a little guidance. About 3 weeks ago, I bought a Gateway MD2614u as an extra computer for use at school and productivity. This computer uses an AMD dual core, has 3GB RAM and the HDD is rated at 250 GB. In reality the HDD has one drive rated at 218 GB with 160GB available and one partitioned drive rated at 14GB with all space available. The problem is, I am losing HDD from the C drive for no apparent reason. For example, on Monday, somehow the computer lost 12GB and 4 more yesterday. I have Vista Premium 64 bit installed and '07 Office Enterprise. I only have about 600 pictures on the HDD and no games, videos or music. I use AVG free and that shows no signs of virus. There is no option for auto backup and the only backup option is to backup to DVD so this should not be a problem. All programs seem to work normally. Before I take it to the winners at the store I bought it at or tried to deal with Gateway, I was hoping you guys could shed some light or point me in the right direction as to sole the "disappearing HDD". It is not yet a problem as there is a fairly large amount of space left, but in about a month it will become an issue. Thanks to everyone in advance!!!

 

Is the free space decreasing or is the capacity decreasing?

If the free space is decreasing you definitely need to check System Restore and any other software you use. If you use any Peer 2 Peer or downloading software, could also be temp files, etc. Running disk cleanup is also recommended.

If the actual capacity is decreasing you can test the drive with other hardware, although if the other hardware show the same decreasing patterns the HDD is probably going bad.

 

It could also be loss of space due to shadow copies (copies of files and data that have been used over a great period of time) that windows system restore uses.... I never use system restore so I disabled it and deleted the shadow copies... you can try what is mentioned above and also try different things mentioned on this site.....

 

The capacity remains constant, but the actual remaining is decreasing. I thought that the system restore was causing this but for some reason, my Vista doesn't offer the auto backup. In fact, the only way I can backup the system is to use Gateway backup directly to DVD.

 

Your vista doesn't offer the auto-backup? LOL

Mine doesn't, but that's because I used vlite to remove it.

You need to go to Control Panel - System - System Protection
You need to uncheck the drives, and apply to turn off system restore. You can also disable the Volume Shadow Copy Service. If you had XP you would also need to disable the System Restore Service.

You can then bring up disk cleanup, go to the 2nd tab, and click Clean Up for the System Restore files to delete all the old System Restore points. Then go back to the main disk cleanup window, check all the boxes (As long as you don't have anything in the Recycle Bin that you need) and click ok, and let disk cleanup free up some space.

If that still doesn't fix it, it's as easy as finding out where the space is being allocated to. Just have to find the extremely large folders/files.

 

Thanks for the information everybody. I went into Disk Cleanup and then the More Options. I deleted the shadow copies and I have regained 25 GB of memory. I appreciate the help on this and I have learned a valuable lesson!!

 

Told you its those damned shadow copies.... I remeber finding out about that the hard way a few years ago... haha.... was installing a game and saving a large photoshop file when I had like 5gb left..... and like wth when I should have had an extra 2gb left.... deleted the copies and 10gb returned

 

i limited my restore/shadow copies to 5GB.. you wont need more than that ... i recommend it ^^