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    "Unknown" Space filling Harddrive

    Discussion in 'Windows OS and Software' started by 84CubsFan, Jul 5, 2011.

  1. 84CubsFan

    84CubsFan Notebook Consultant

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    Okay, here is a weird one. I have a Win7 64bit machine, 500GB hard drive partitioned into a 273GB OS C: drive and a 180GB data D: drive.

    1) All of a sudden I notice that my D: drive is almost out of space. This is weird because last I checked I had 40 or 50GB of free space.

    2) I do some snooping around and WinDirStat shows 57GB of "unknown" space.

    3) If this were the C: drive, I would think that perhaps this is the shadowcopy backup. But this is the D: drive with no OS installed, no pagefile, etc. -- just files, movies, music, etc. I try to clean up the disk anyway. I try to run chkdsk anyway. Nothing.

    ???

    Help? Anyone know how to recover that space? Can anyone help me figure out what's going on? Many thanks in advance.
     
    84CubsFan, Jul 5, 2011
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  2. anseio

    anseio All ways are my ways.

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    Download a defrag program, VOPT9. You can set the grid to be small and then you can click on any square on the drive and see its contents.
     
    anseio, Jul 6, 2011
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  3. 84CubsFan

    84CubsFan Notebook Consultant

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    Resolved, more or less. Turns out it was reserved system protection space, which I reduced to the minimum. No idea how it got set to 55gb, nor why it only showed up now. Still have some 535mb of "unknown" space on that drive (no unknown space whatsoever on my C: drive). I don't understand it.
     
    84CubsFan, Jul 6, 2011
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