Wrong hard drive size calculations in vista

Hi,

I put in a new 250 gb hard drive into my x200 and loaded Vista Business onto it. I expected while loading the OS, I would be asked whether I wanted to create a partition or not. Never an option appeared, so I went into the Disk Management program and created a partition. So I have my C drive at 117 gb, and my Z drive at 115 gb. I tossed about 40 gb of music, pictures, and movies onto the Z and loaded about 40 gb amount of programs, data, etc onto the C.

So when I go to my computer, it shows that the C drive has only about 30 gb while the Z drive has about 70 gb free. The C drive should not have only 30 gb, it should have about 70 gb free as well. The only thing I can think of is that when calculating the disk space for the C drive, the OS adds how full each drive is and displays that for C.

Anyone have any suggestions on how to fix this?

Thanks!

 

Yeah with chkdsk. Sounds like it's "lost free space" problem.

Rightclick on C: -> Properties -> Tools -> Error-check -> Check Now. You'll need to restart for the C: drive to be checked..

 

Welcome to Windows System Restore. It gobbles up space on the HDD and can take a massive 10-20% for itself. It should hand it back when space gets very low.

Also, run disk cleanup to recover temp files and other files that can be deleted. Dont forget C will also have a hibernate file and swap file on it as well, this will be a total of just over twice your RAM size.

 

Prolly windows restore points.. after a while they can easily eat up 10-15GB of space or more maybe.

 

Wow, that sucks. So how do I turn off windows restore or turn down the properties?

 

You could, check out the tweak vista guide here.


but if you screw up, no backsies for you!

 

I really doubt System Restore can take 40GB of a 110GB partition. It takes 15% max as far as I know. You may want to download CCleaner and check for temp files too.
By the way a simple CheckDisk won't harm you laptop you may want to do it just to make sure it's not your hdd's fault.

 

Ran checkdisk and everything was savvy. I'll try out the ccleaner. i really hope it's something fixable. I don't have a cd drive so it's a pain to reinstall vista.

 

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/diskspacev.html

Check that out. It tells you how much of your HDD is used up by System Restore.

You could decrease some of it if necessary

 

According to Microsoft, Windows Restore use 15% MAX of the partition(then overwrites restore points) which in the OP's case is like what....20-25GB? And he/she is missing 40GB.

 

So I powered up my laptop today, and found that another 10 gbs are full. I didn't install anything or put more data onto it...

 

I saw the suggestion that you turn off restore point, but did you do it? The other thing that can use a suprisingly large amount of storage is Internet Explorer's temporary files. It can consume up to a GB. Also your pagefile (swapfile) which was briefly mentioned before, can be rather huge. MS reccomends 6.5GB for mine. Also, if you've installed updates recently, MS keeps around the old versions of all the updated files so you can backout fixes. Not sure where they keep it in Vista but they were pretty easy to find in XP. Also, not everything you toss in the recycle bin gets deleted right away. I once discovered over 4GB of pictures in my recycle bin. And MS update (and other updaters for Acrobat, antivirus, etc) default to download the latest update automatically.

Something you might want to do, is bring up My Computer, navigate to you C: drive, the click the Tools->Folder options, then the View tab. Click on "Show hidden folders" and uncheck "Hide protected operating system files". Click apply and then "Apply to Folders". Now you can see what is really taking up space, like hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys.

 

Go to C: properties and click on disk cleanup.

Look at the options there, and there is an option that allows to delete all except for the most recent restore point.

See how much space you get back.

Greg