strange hdd problem

[itspace]

hi so i recently bought my new comp and everything works fine. but lately i noticed that my hdd was filling up faster than expected.

i kept doing search after search for files on my comp and i only come up with ~30gigs but it says i have used up 75, so theres a 45 gigs difference. even if i missed some files when searching i dont think it should add up to 45 gigs.

anyone have any clue as to whats happening or how to fix it? i am running vista home premium 32 bit and using a 500 gig WD HDD. it is a NTFS file system. i have already ran checkdisk on it.

 

[itspace]

anyone with anyclue as to where to start fixing this?? i'm gonna bleed to death( my hard drive is) at this rate

 

[MegaVovaN]

Use WinDirStat to find out where space is going.

Lifehacker Article

http://windirstat.info/

In comments to LH article readers suggest many alternatives to WinDirStat.

I highly doubt this is caused by hardware problem...

 

[itspace]

ok so i dl'ed windirstat and it says i have 30.4 gigs used. windows says i used 84 gigs giving me 381 gigs of free space (total 465 gigs). i also had this other program treesize pro which gave me a similar number.

so this is most likely a vista problem right? anyway to fix it?

 

[Zepper]

There are viruses, trojans, etc. that write a lot to the HDD. If you can find where and what the files are that are taking up the space it may give a lead.

.bh.

 

[itspace]

Originally posted by: Zepper
There are viruses, trojans, etc. that write a lot to the HDD. If you can find where and what the files are that are taking up the space it may give a lead.

.bh.

in total i have 465 gigs. windirstat says i have 30.4 gigs used. windows says i have used 84 gigs. even if i had virus/trojan etc wouldn't windirstat say i have 84 gigs used because even if virus/trojan was writing something there should be a file of some sort no?

 

[Zepper]

And welcome to the AT forums, in case no one else has.

They often write to hidden directories but disk analysis tools should see those too. Even though it may not be used yet, Win reserves 10% of each partition's space for the Recycle folder which was OK back in the day when drives were measured in MB instead of GB - you can cut that back on that by right clicking on the Recycle bin, click on Properties and set the size(s) you want. I usually limit them to 100 MB or so, but I almost always do a permanent delete (Shift-Del) so there's usually nothing in there anyway. And if you're using the Dynamic swap file, there can be some unused space reserved there too. Need to read up on how Win wastes drive space and what to do about it. Use your favorite search engine to find articles on it specific to your ver. of Win. CrapCleaner (aka CCleaner is a free DL from MajorGeeks.com) that'll help free up space you may not think of. Be careful, it will want to delete all your cookies each time you run it, so go thru and uncheck all instances of cookies. Let your anti-spyware take care of your cookies as they only delete the known hinky cookies - did I just say "hinky cookies"? Why yes I did...

.bh.