Vanished free space? o.O
 

I have a strange problem. I was clearing up my unused files and clutter from my compy and I noticed I have a huge loss of free space on my drive C:\

My C: partition is 10 Gb. I highlighted all the files and the contents on the drive only weigh 6 Gb, but I only have 200 megs of free space according to explorer.

I'm not very good at math, but even I know that 10 - 6 != 0.2

Here be photographic evidence (I captioned it for your non-hungarian folks):
http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/963/spacevt3.png

Apparently, I lost 4 gigs of free space somehow. Before you say:

- I emptied the recycle bin
- I cleared clutter (temp, internet junk...etc)
- No hidden files, I highlited them all
- I don't use any drivespace programs
- I don't have any third party disc management progs installed

I have Norton System Works however, but I don't use it's disk features, never have. Oh, the Norton Protected Recycle bin is empty too.

I really need that 4 gigs of space. Any ideas?:(

Chkdsk C: /f

Thanks, but I tried that already, didn't help.

However, I managed to get back 2 gigs of that lost 4. I turned off the hibernation option in power saving. Also, I moved the pagefile (virtual memory) to the other partition, but that didn't do anything. On the virtual memory management screen it shows that the pagefile has been moved to the D:\ partition, but in TC I still see the pagefile on the C: and none on the D... curious...

EDIT: I was sooo wrong. I was looking at the wrong drive, the H. The D partition has the pagefile, so I manually deleted the one from the C:, not I have 3.9 gigs of free space. Still need to snoop a little for system files.

I really hope this maneuver won't crash my system...

Did you reboot after moving the page file?

Also,did you check the System Restore function?

try start->run Restore/rstrui.exe .. check if it's enabled, probably yes. it takes quite a space

Thanks! The system restore function I need, saved my life a few times so it stays. Other than that I killed everything that takes up space, so I'm good for the time being.

Again, thx for the tipz!

Not arguing about it.
Do you know, however, that Windows keeps a LOT of OLD restore points? :wacko:
You might want to leave only the few most recent ones and axe the rest.
Saves a lot of HDD space, that.

I have none in my laptop. I can't afford it on only 27 gB on HDD space. :oh:

Amazing!!! I have the exact same problem lately. i used to have plenty of disk space now it's 200-300MB. WTF?!

just last week i cleared up some space by uninstalling some programme i never used and it read 800MB free. seem ok bu tnow it's back to 200MB-300mb what is going on?

i moved restore points to other disk and reduced them. the recycle bin i already small.

windows take up 3.6 GB of space of which pagefile.sys takes up 1 gb? How do i move the pagefile.sys to another disk? and even if i move that 1gb would this space be filled up ? just like the 500 MB that somehow dissapeared. would defragging help? can it even be done with such low disk space? Honestly i dont' know what the hell MS is doing. before that disk always had a little over 1GB free space. now suddenly withouth any new programmes installed it has only 200 or 340. depends how long you wait for it when it starts up.

I have other disks with plenty of space but this system disk has a sudden problem of running out of memorry. but i am not sure if adding a partition from another disk would be possible or even a good thing to do (since they would be phisically separated).

System properties - advanced - virtual memory. You can change the size of the pagefile and the disk it resides on.

Defragging wouldn't.
Not with M$hit defragger. But with a different program? Sure. The only difference would be how fast and efficient the process will be.
Manually clear contents of the Temp and Temporary Internet Files directories.

I think there's also some uninstallation information stored with some of the system patches, and deleting that can save you even more space. Never done it, though.

You could perhaps move your entire "My Documents" directory to a different drive? It requires editing the registry keys, but works if you provide the correct paths.