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    Keep losing hard drive space :(

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by BryanL, Apr 10, 2008.

  1. BryanL

    BryanL Notebook Consultant

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    Hey all,

    I seem to be losing hard drive space for no reason. I went from 105gb left on my C:/ to 103 to 101 and then to 100. I am not installing any programs or downloading anything to make me lose 5gb. I am not sure why this is happening. I have run spybot and everything and I have no viruses so I am not sure whats the problem.
     
  2. Rodster

    Rodster Merica

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    Try clearing out your restore points. I take it this is Vista?
     
  3. Gintoki

    Gintoki Notebook Prophet

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  4. ravenmorpheus

    ravenmorpheus Notebook Deity

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    Also empty the recycle bin and do a disk cleanup, I found 5gb that way...
     
  5. McGrady

    McGrady Notebook Virtuoso

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    Restore pts/shadow copies will eat your hard drive space daily
     
  6. ikovac

    ikovac Cooler and faster... NBR Reviewer

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    The problem is in Shadow copy. Vista keeps old files just in case. By default it takes a lot of space because it takes 30% of an empty space at the point of installation, ant then when you install other programs, drivers etc, you can run out of space because Vista keeps a lot of old stuff on the disk.



    1. Take control over Shadow copy space.
    - Press start button, enter "cmd".
    - Right click on cmd.exe in the results list, and choose "Run as an administrator".
    -Type "vssadmin list shadowstorage"

    You'll see a lot of space taken by shadow storage.
    Type "vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=3000MB"

    This will make your shadow copy for c: disk 3000MB big and will store it on c:. Do the maths for other possibilities.
    Minimum size you can set is 300MB.


    /for means what volume shadow it will monitor. /on means on which volume it will build it. /maxsize means the max size. It understands MB/GB etc.

    2. Defragmentation in Vista defrag will give you back even more of space.

    Cheers,

    Ivan