Half the drive is full.

[Alien Bay]

I have a recently acquired a used Dell that has a 250 Gb SATA drive that I reformatted and installed Windows XP Prof. The only other program I have installed is Norton virus software.

When I right-click on the C drive, however, it shows 109 Gb is used !!!! Where/who/what is using all that drive space? Windows only uses a little over a gb of space so who's using the rest? Is this a Windows NTFS issue?

Thoughts appreciated. Thank you.

[katzdvd]

Hi Alien,
Don't know if this is your situation, but here goes;

You may have installed a 2nd copy of windows, leaving the first untouched.

When you reformatted; did you delete all the partions & re-create new ones in the unpartioned area?

Also, I just worked on an HP that had recovery files on a separate partition that took up 20+GB.

I deleted that partition D: during setup, & also the C: partition, & recreated new. That way, you can set up the HD w/ any size parts. that you want.

At 109 GB on your drive, something is left over from before. Sounds to me like a 2nd copy of windows...

regards, katz

[Alien Bay]

Yes. That could be it. I did not delete any partitions but left the one that was there in place. But it must be more than Windows. It must be everything that was there before as that's a lot more space than Windows uses.
Curious, though that I can't access to see what's there. I plan on reformatting and starting over. 109 Gb is a lot to waste.
Thanks.

[drfsupercenter]

Delete all partitions, then make a new one

[camj979]

I've sort of got the same problem, just a little different. I have a 80gb hard drive on my laptop(which I've had for about a year now). When I checked it a couple of days ago, I only used about 12gb of space. So I go and check it tonight and it now says 31gb used!! I haven't installed anything new and I ran CCcleaner to clear all my Temp files. Does anyone know what caused this?? The drive is NTFS and isn't partitioned. Thanks.

[Chewy]

http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml

treesize will find the big stuff quick

[camj979]

thanks Chewy..I'll try this and see if it works. Will this fix a problem with the HDD if there is one??

[camj979]

ok..so I used Treesize and I did some calculating on my own. It seems I'm only really using about 9gb of space, but when you look at my properties of the c: drive, it says about 30gb are being used. Anyone know what's going on here?
Thanks.

[fozziebear]

Try this :
Navigate to Start | My Computer | Tools | Folder Options.
Select the View tab. Under the "Hidden Files and Folders" heading, select "Show hidden files and folders"... As far as your question to repair your hard disk you can go to the website of your HD manufacterer and download some repair tools

[camj979]

I just don't get this...my hard drive must be going bad. So last night it miraclously went back to showing 9GB used on the c:drive pie chart. It showed the same this morning, so I backuped a movie using Ripit4me and Shrink, which was about 8GB total. As soon as I was done backing it up, I deleted from the folder the file was created in. So just to make sure, I go back to the c: drive pie chart, and now it shows 20GB USED!! I know for a fact I deleted all the movie files from the computer and there is no way I used 11GB in 30minutes. Does anyone know what couold be causing this??

[gs47]

Something silly but maybe overlooked; do you have a Norton Protected Recycle Bin? Need to manually dump those as I recall.

[Chewy]

when I delete, I hold the shift key down, no second chances

bye bye forever

[soup]

The very first post, Alien Bay said they had just installed Norton.

[camj979]

HOLY CRAP THAT WAS IT!!!! Thanks gs47...I appreciate the help,
you da man!!!. I'll be sure to empty that out from now on.

[gs47]

Glad it was so easy! I use to have Norton long ago but no more. You have the option of a regular recycle bin or a protected one, plus various options/settings on those. Probably right click>properties (just guessing from memory).