Where has all my hard drive gone?

I have a new T530 with a 500gb HD running Windows 8. I've put no files or data on it. The only programs I have downloaded are Google Chrome, Logitech mouse drivers and a program called Speccy to analyze the disk. I also downloaded four Lenovo utility program modifications, and I think windows update runs automatically in the background.

I don't understand the missing gigs and, even creepier, the increasingly missing gigs.

Speccy tells me the "real size" of my drive is what I expect, 500gb. Then it tells me that the "capacity" is 466gb.

Question 1: Where are my other 34gb?

Then I try to make further sense of the Sanskrit mumbo jumbo (to me) that Speccy generates. It seems to say I have four "partitions" on the HD, uninformatively named 0, 1, 2 and 3.

-- 0 is 0.97gb
-- 1 is 260mb
-- 2 is 454gb
-- 3 is 10.1gb

Question 2: What are these partitions?

Partition 2 says the "used space" is 33.9gb and the "free space" is 420 gb. So, out of the box on a 500gb HD, I have 80gb of "unusable" space.

Question 3: How come I used to get along just fine with a Thinkpad with an 80gb drive and a Mac Powerbook with a 40gb drive not that many years ago?

Now the creepy part. The first time I ran Speccy, just three days ago, I had only had 25gb of "used space" on Partition 2. Now it has mushroomed up to 34gb.

Question 4: What has added a frightening 9gb to Partition 2 in just three days?

 

There are 4 partitions on your 500GB hard drive. I don't know exactly what 0 and 1 refer to, but 2 is most likely your C: drive and 3 is most likely your factory recovery drive.

You can use Windows "Disk Management" program to view your disk allocations. (Type "disk management" without quotes into the search box of the Windows Orb pop-up.)

Note that the value 500 in the "500GB" is not literal nor decimal. A 500GB drive has 465GB available, and the actual storage available to the user is a bit less because the system reserves a small amount for disk administration. On top of that, the drive may be subdivided into partitions (a.k.a logical drives, usually labeled as C:, D: and so on). Over time, even if you don't add files to the C: partition, it may be occupied by Restore Points created automatically by Windows System Updates, plus other not-yet-cleared temporary files and caches.


500.000.000.000 byte / 1024 = 488.281.250 Kbyte
. . 488.281.250 Kbyte / 1024 = . . . 476.837 Mbyte
. . . . . 476.837 Mbyte / 1024 = . . . . . . 465 Gbyte


(I felt dizzy reading your post. It is so dramatized and traumatized.)

 

My uncle, who had bought an ASUS laptop couple months ago came to me with a problem of it becoming slow.

Well i took a closer look and WOW. Somehow it was set to make live backups to partition 2.

He had primary partition (150gb) and 2nd partition (~600gb) and the funny thing is: there was huge 500gb file on the second partition filling up every second slowing down the whole system while doing so.

After inspecting over 7gb of bloatware i decided for reformat after backing up his data

The amount of bloatware is just insane nowdays, never start using new laptop right away, it needs total makeover in software level.

 

This is my thread and I'll be as dramatic or traumatic as I think may be helpful to my understanding of these issues. In addition, I doubt that I'm the least computer literate person reading this board, though I may be close. I hope to explicate these confusing issues for myself and others similarly situated.

So, to begin, the calculating comment above by Kaso was a real puzzler. However, I've quickly learned to respect his expertise. Here's how I solved the puzzle, and I find the solution disturbing:

Manufacturers advertise hard drives using the commonly understood decimal system, whereas the computer measures the capacity in the binary system. In short, the marketing of HD's suggests that a "gigabyte" has a 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas the binary computer recognizes a gigabyte as about 1,073,000,000 bytes. This means a drive marketed as X gigabytes actually has about 7.4% fewer gigabytes in computer-binary terms.

I hardly think the average consumer, or even the above average consumer, would "note" that. To me, it borders on misleading advertising. If I buy 500 bushels of wheat and get only 463, I hardly expect a satisfactory (or legal) answer to be that the seller measures bushels in a base 2 math system, which defies common understanding. Perhaps I should pay that seller in binary dollars.

The math suggests to me that the misleading capacity figures will get worse as drive capacity prefixes increase. I haven't exactly figured it out, but I suspect a HD advertised as X terabytes would actually have to be reduced by almost 10% to account for the decimal/binary divergence.

The proper prefix for one billion in the binary system is gi bi not gi ga. So I hope Windows uses the proper prefixes when I figure out where Disk Management is.

Which is the next mystery to solve. (Being in Windows 8 reminds me of the time I was lost in the Okefenokee Swamp with the night closing in.)

 

Answers:

Question 1) as Kaso stated above, there are differences between a decimal gigabyte (GB) and a binary gigabyte (GiB). A decimal gigabyte is 1,000,000,000 whereas a binary gigabyte is 1,073,741,824 (2 to the 30th power). Since computers only understand binary, they divide the available space by binary gigabytes and this results in an approximately 7% reduction in apparent storage space. In your case, 500GB = 465.66 GiB, which your system rounded up to 466. So you have the correct total amount of storage space.

Question 2) I'm not entirely sure what partition 0 is, but partition 1 is reserved space necessary for Windows to function (it works similarly to a Linux swap file, if you're familiar with that), partition 2 is your usable area, including your Windows install and all your files, and partition 3 is the Lenovo recovery partition.

Question 3) operating systems and programs take up a lot more space now than they used to. Windows 7 & 8 require 10 times or more the amount of space Windows XP required for an installation, and any additional pre-installed programs have grown in size in a similar fashion.

Question 4) Have you used Windows Update or Lenovo Update at all in that time? Updates can take up a lot of space in temporary files. That's in addition to any other programs you may have installed.

 

I should have put a "smile" icon next to my friendly comment, which I gently put in brackets. So, instead of being considered as helful to a fellow forum member by trying to provide a revealing explanation, I created animosity (and received no "like" or "rep" for the volunteered time I put in).

The "hard drive capacity" vs. "Windows presentation of such capacity" confusion has existed for a long time. We should all vent our frustration at the inventors of the computers and the hard drives (some of whom, the best, used to work for IBM).

Nevertheless, if you right-click on the name of a drive (or partition) in Windows Explorer and select Properties, you will see the actual capacity and current usage indication. For example, this is what is shown for my 750GB HDD that is almost full:

​

See the "750..."? That's what I paid for using real, decimal dollars.

To djembe's notes above, I want to add that the hibernation file takes up space as well. I turned hibernation off (powercfg –H off) as my C: drive lives on a SSD and saved a big chunk of space. Also, in my case, I don't need the Lenovo SWTOOLS folder, and its absence gives back over 4GB of space. So on and so forth.

Happy holiday!

 

Kilt (the original poster),
Hello, after reading your questions I thought I would provide you with some info about what 10.1 gb factory recovery partition is all about.

I recommend you take a look at Chapter5: Recovery Overview of the T530 userguide
http://www.lenovo.com/shop/americas/content/user_guides/t530_w530_ug_en.pdf

So if you have a problem where windows stops working, but your harddrive is still fine, you can use Lenovo's recovery tools to return read the info from that factory recovery partition, and return your C drive to the state it was in when it left the factory. This will give you a working windows8 system, but it will erase all your data and installed applications, so it's still important that you backup data that's important to you, and don't loose the the install disks for important applications, like office etc, cause you may need them one day.

The above are tools created by Lenovo. But Microsoft has also including some recovery tools in Windows8. Rather than try to explain these tools I'm going to refer you to Paul Thurrott's Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows Home Page . It's a pretty good resource for learning more about Windows8, and any microsoft software.

You may want to read his article on how to create recovery media, with Windows8 tools
Windows 8 Tip: Create Recovery Media | Windows 8 content from Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows

Both of the above tool, the Lenovo recovery tools, and Microsoft's Windows recocovery tools, have the ability to create recovery media onto a usb key or CD-rom. If you do this, you wouldn't necessary need that 10.1gb recovery partition on your harddrive. But you may want to keep it for the piece of of mind anyways.

Finally a disclaimer, I read lots of posts, articles, but I'm not an expert. Take my advise as things you may want to learn more about.

 

Before I report my adventures with Disk Manager, let me report that immediately after making my last post I shut down the computer to go to church. Upon returning I noticed MS updates loading. After logging in, I immediately ran Speccy again. I am now up to 35.4 gigs of used space -- almost a gig just today with no voluntary downloads by me. This is INSANE, as Crazy Eddy used to say.

Kaso, I assure you 100% that you did not offend me. You always educate me. I'm not interested in computers and it would bore me to write just about technical things, so upon occasion I deliberately include some . . . what shall I call it . . . not drama or trauma . . . but rhetorical flourishes. I am more likely to offend than most because, though I post on many forums (on some of which I am the helpful "expert"), I have never in my life used an emoticon. And won't.

I first (and last) learned computer programming in the summer of '61 on an IBM 650 computer at Columbia University's Watson Lab. We were taught some basic machine language, SOAP, and some elementary stuff from the exotically new FORTRAN. Yes, the summer of '61 . . . which was likely the pinnacle of my mental powers and certainly the pinnacle of my computer programming knowledge.

On to Disk Manager.

 

You would go insane looking at every gig coming and going on your hard drive!

I use CCleaner, which reports the restore points automatically created by Windows Updates (certain application installers also create restore points):



I find the restore points, which do occupy disk space, very helpful and leave them there for a month or so, when everything seems to run fine after the updates, then I remove all but the last one.

To be fair, though, Windows 7 is "big" not because it is "bloated", but because it does provide a lot of useful under-the-hood features that maintain a stable computing environment.