Can't find files supposedly taking up 60Gb

[Philip Herlihy]

I looked at a friend's machine today - wouldn't boot, and I eventually got
it working using chkdsk in the recovery console.

Afterwards I gave it the "once over", and was surprised to see, in
Explorer's Properties popup, that 60Gb of the "183Gb" disk was in use. I
loaded and ran a nifty little utility called "Treesize" which give a folder
breakdown of disk usage, and that could only find about 6Gb.

I've never seen this before. Is it just that XP is incorrectly detecting
the size of what seems to be a very large disk (in a standard PC bought
recently) or could there be something sinister going on? The chap has about
150Mb of music downloads on the machine, but doesn't have broadband, so it's
unlikely to be an involuntary P2P server.

 

[Mike Fields]

Well, one place that "hides" information is the restore
points. I don't remember the exact sequence, but they
are out of sight -- if he has the restore size set large, it
could be a significant chunk of it.

mikey

 

[Guest]

You may try going to ccleaner.com and downloading the crap cleaner. run
it... Then you may also try downloading spybot and running it.
Do you have your system restore files/programs saved in a virtual drive
parmeter? 60 gb isn't really that much. WhHat is on the drive for programs?
I think after you run the disk utilities that clean your disk and the two
that I wrote about, anything able to be released back to you, will be.
Good Luck

 

[Philip Herlihy]

Thanks, Mike & Craig - I'll look into these suggestions. Certainly hadn't
thought of the Restore Points!