Missing HD space

Im hoping that somebody on this forum can help me, because apparently nobody else on the entire internet has a clue as to whats going on here.

My laptop is missing 37 gigabytes of space.
Its not the pagefile or anything else, its not a huge hidden file, Ive tried cleaning the HD, defragging, checking the partitions playing with various settings and limiting system restore. Ive tried a few registery scanners, just in case, and done several scans for virii and ad/spy/malware. There was a little spyware, but it was normal stuff. Some registry errors, but fixing them didnt change anything.
Its none of those.

I noticed this when I first 'ran out' of HD space. I was somewhat suspicious because I KNEW I had only installed a few things thus far, so how could I have used ~90gb of space?
Well, I hadnt, as this picture explains:

Thats all files on the C drive, My Documents, hidden files, everything. A little of the missing space is part of the restore partition, but its only about a gigabyte I think.
This is very frustrating, and any help would be appreciated.

 

Hrm, thats interesting. Do you have up to date virus scan?
I knew of a few viruses that would make hidden replications of files that were really hard to find. Every time you would reboot, they would double hidden files and eventually take up the whole drive. I dont' think they could even be seen by normal means.
Otherwise, that is a really weird problem. I don't really have much to suggest. I would call IBM though.
Also, can you pull up the partition table and see what it says?

 

Aye, I scanned it with an up to date AdAware, Norton and a few others. None of them turned up anything serious, and I dont think its the virus you mentioned because the amount of space Ive lost doesnt change as far as I can tell.

Like I said, there are only two partitions, the main one and the restore partition.

 

I don't know how the restore partition works, but my understanding is that it can be significantly larger than 1 GB, depending on the size of your backups. If the backup includes all or most of your files from My Documents, for example, the restore partition could well grow to 30 GB or more. But as I indicated, this is only a hunch and I hope someone else can confirm how exactly the restore partition works.

 

Has your computer crashed recently? Because I retrieved 14.4GB of HDD space by deleting those useless HDMP files in the WINDOWS directory.

 

Not a great solution but...

To try to track where all the space is going to you could try doing the following:

1) [Click] Start menu > Search Or [Press] Windows keys + f
2) [Click] All files and folders
3) [Click] What size is it?
4) [Click] Specify size (in KB)
5) [Type] 524288 (which is 512MB)
6) Take a look at all the files it displays.

This will show all files on your C:\ drive that are larger than 512MB. Obviously, adjust the size to widen or narrow your search.


Matt

 

The restore partition is just the space that has the Windows installer and all the software that came with the computer at factory default, its not a backup.

Qhs and Matt:
There are no files taking up the space, as you can see in the screencapture I posted.
I got a program which scans your computer and estimates the distribution of memory usage across the board, and all that missing space showed up as was 'UNKNOWN', so basically the computer has no idea whats there, or if anything is there.

 

This article might explain one possible cause.
http://www.securityfocus.com/infocus/1822

Although it feels far fetched.

 

Waaaaaaay too long and technical for me.

*sigh*

The good folks at IBM couldnt give me any explanation as to why exactly nearly half my harddrive is gone. I ended up hanging up on some idiot in India who gave me the modern day equivalent of 'Its evil spirits, you need to cut the brain out and rub salt on it.', IE: Format and start over again.

 

That sounds like good advice to me, especially since "nobody else on the entire internet has a clue as to whats going on here", as you wrote in your initial post. Good luck and please let us know if you were able to recover the missing hard drive space.