Why is my thinkpad using so much hard drive

I have a 60gb hard drive and have 50 left to deal with due to 10gb being automatically dedicated to the system. I've added up pictures, program files, music and any large collection of power points I have stored. Why are 20gb of used space unaccounted for? I have to admit that I am ignorant about the system backup files and this seems to be the only place where I can't find file sized to account for. I never had this issue on other laptops. I REALLY need that 20 gigs.

Any input would be appreciated.

 

60-50=10 not 20?

 

60-10= 50

i don't know where to put that 20GB of lost space... tell us how much is your free space in C: and its total capacity.

 

Caches, System Restores, Page Files, and general Application Data.

 

I believe Lenovo puts their ThinkVantage in a different partition so that you can make a backup disc easily. This would be why it says your total capacity is lower than it should be. (It only includes your main partition.)

Matt

 

Also, you must note that 60GB does not equal 60 true gigabytes. The hard drive manufacturers say that a gigabyte is really 10^9 when in reality it is 2^30. This means that you really got 60000000000 bytes or 55.88 GB of space. This is the first part of the lost space equation.

The second part is the Lenovo recovery partition which, on my system, is around 4GB (I'm not there to get an exact number for you). With these two factors accounted for, you are left with only about 51.88 GB of total space for your Windows installation.

The third part is formatting, depending on the number of files on the drive and the size of those files, a certain amount of space is needed to store the file tables. This isn't usually huge, but can be on the order of a 100 or 200 MB.

The last part is that Windows uses a lot of space, not just for the system files themselves, but also for the page file, virtual memory, restore data, temp files, application data, and all of the other intricacies of Windows. They have helped out a little bit by adding the Disk Cleanup utility, but this only cleans up the things I listed above which are truly temporary. Some things, like page files and hibernation space (if enabled) are pre-allocated so that the space is always there (and unusable to other purposes) when the system needs it.

This is a pretty complicated explanation, I know, but it should help to understand where all the drive space really goes. Some people do remove the Recovery data, but that only frees up about 4GB and I like having it around as a backup.

 

Thanks for your input. Kyle, thanks for the details. This should help me locate some used disk space. I plan on upgrading to a larger drive very soon but I would just like to understand the disk usage before I settle on another size drive.
Does anyone have a non-lenovo bought 100 -120 gb (5400 or 7200 rpm) drive that fits the Z61?

p.s.
Sorry, I have only 12 GB to account for. I can use winter break to do some reading about my system. Thanks for the input again.

C: drive = 10.1 GB free space, about 50GB total size, my total came to only 28GB used space (from adding media file sizes and program files)

 

I went to C: drive on my moms laptop with vista and it was using 20GB of space and I didnt know where it was going figured out it was in restore points and shadow copies if you go to your disk cleaup under properties and then more options and cleanup restore points and shadow copies it will free up tons of space when I did this I went from 106GB free to 125GB free

 

If you've done any system backups... that is also a large amount of allocated space.

Also on my t61 the Vista rescue and recovery partition was about 6gb before I deleted it.

 

Turn off system restore on your hard drive. That should save quite a bit of space.