Lost Hard Drive Space in Windows XP Pro

My parents have an XPS 1330 computer just like mine. I set it up with three partitions. The partition to which Windows XP is installed is 25 GB. It now has 51 MB left. I have analyzed all the files and folders (including hidden ones). If you right click on the Windows folder and select properties it says there are 18.6 GB in it.

I went through every file and folder in the Windows Folder (including hidden files and folders) looking for an obnoxiously large one. There weren't any. I then selected all the files and folders simultaneously, right clicked, selected properties, and the total was 3.88 GB. So somewhere in the Windows folder I have managed to loose around 15 GB of space. How do I figure out what's going on? Ordinarily I would probably just re-format and re-install but saving time would be advantageous for me right now. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

hidden folders, such as the "Temp" folder. use a program like CCleaner ( http://www.ccleaner.com/) to get rid of this "ballast".

 

Delete the old restore points using Accesories > Disk Cleanup > more options.

 

WinDirStat ( http://windirstat.info/ ) is a great too to find all the files on your computer. And CCleaner is good for the clear up.

 

As I mentioned, in the original post, I checked the hidden folders as well. Thanks anyways.

Tried that too. No dice. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'll give it a look. Thanks.

 

From Nankuru's link, I found that my Windows Installer folder has 14 GB of files in it. According to Google searching it appears that it should have less than 3 GB in it.

It appears that I have a ton of orphaned Windows Installer Patch (.msp) files in this folder. I'm in the process of trying to figure out how to remove them without causing damage to the system. It appears that some are important and some are orphaned and I'm not sure how to tell the difference yet.

Edit: By comparison the properly working XPS 1330 has only 1.2 GB in the installer folder.

 

In CCleaner, right-click on Hotfix Uninstallers and select Analyze. Those are pretty safe to delete. But I don't see why they should be 14 GB though. Anyway, try it and see what size it comes up with. If you decide to delete them, right-click on it again and select Clean.

 

That only cleared up about a gigabyte of it. I'm slipstreaming SATA drivers onto my XP Pro SP3 disk. Time to clean house. Thanks for trying anyways everyone.

 

defrag the drive and clean up the disk. Some sectors are just clogging up space.

 

I just checked mine and have about 400mb. Is it safe, or prudent to delete there?

 

Been there done that. One of the first things. No dice.

 

Great free and easy prog to take care about Windows in the future: Advanced SystemCare Free v3 http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html

 

Yes, it is safe to delete them, especially after a week or something. Those Hotfix Uninstallers are for when you want to uninstall a hotfix that's causing a problem to your system. Normally, after a few days or a week, if the hotfix isn't giving you any trouble, you will never need to uninstall it. Worse come to worst, if you ever need to uninstall a hotfix that you had deleted the uninstaller, all you have to do is reinstall the hotfix again and the uninstaller will be back.

 

To everyone who has contributed to this thread, I sincerely appreciate it. I had very brief, maybe snappy answer much of the time yesterday. I apologize. My excuse is that I had been fooling with this thing for a long time and had little sleep the night before, but that's no reason. Thanks again for the help everyone.

My solution ended up being reformatting the partition that XP Pro was on and reinstalling with XP SP3. I had not yet made the upgrade to SP3 because I was worried it would hose the system anyways after some horror stories so I was planning on waiting till I had time for a clean install so maybe it was a good thing.

Thanks again.

 

What do you mean by reinstalling with XP SP3 but not yet made the upgrade to SP3? For the record, SP3 is very stable, and so are all the updates that came afterwards.

 

Before yesterday both of the XPS 1330's that I maintain had been using SP2. The reason for this was that I had read some horror stories about computers going haywire if they updated to SP3 rather than doing a clean install with SP3 slipstreamed. So what I meant was that yesterday I ended up taking an SP3 disc that I had bought outright, slipstreamed SATA drivers on to it so that it would work with the two XPS 1330's and reformatted and reinstalled. Glad to hear it's pretty stable. Thanks again.

 

Thanks stewie, didn't know that. There sure were a bunch of them

dpilot, glad to see you solved the problem.