cant free space on drive c

[Guest]

i have recently done a system recovery but it still keeps coming up i have
got very low disc space.i havent got nearly half of what was on it
before.when i go into defragment i have got 0%.i have done a virus scan and
disc cleanup.i think some of my films and music might still be on it but cant
find them anywhere.have been into my backup.could someone please help and
tell me what to do.

 

[Will Denny]

Hi Sheryl

From a command prompt type

cd\

then

dir /a/s

does the result show about what you think you have in free disk space?

--


Will Denny
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Please reply to the News Groups

 

[Guest]

Have you right-clicked on the drive c into properties? Have you done a disk
cleanup? Have you done a chkdsk? Have you done a defrag? Is your drive c
formatted ntfs or fat32 or fat?

What is the size of your C and how much space have you used and how much is
stated to be left?

 

[Guest]

sorry to have taken so long i have just been into properties and done a disc
check,it said windows replaced bad clusters in file 120083 in my backup.i had
allready done a disc cleanup and i cant do a defragment properly because
there is 0% space in disc space.when i try to do it it still stays the same.i
have also done a chkdsk.nothing has worked.my c drive is ntfs.it says i have
got 160mb free space and the total size is 183GB.

 

[Guest]

what do you mean by a command prompt type.i am just new to this.i had 160mb
until i went into properties and done disk check.now i have only 44mb and
there is nothing to clear when i go into disc cleanup.when i am doing a virus
scan it comes up some of the videos and music i had on it before but cant
find them anywhere.

 

[Tom Willett]

Have you considered using the Windows Help Files and searching for command
prompt?

 

[Guest]

OK, try a couple of things here:

First, get to the cmd prompt by going to (>) start > run > cmd -(type
cmd in the window)

You will get a black screen with the c prompt. It should be somewhat famliar
to you as this is a dos window and there will be a cursor blinking.

Type cleanmgr then press enter

You will get a small window showing you the drive(s) to select and begin the
cleaning process. Make the appropriate selection and click ok. This should
get you back lots of free space so wait a few minutes until it gives you the
results and the option to ok the cleanup.

Hopefully you will be able to do another chkdsk and then a defrag by now.

If you can't go into safe mode by rebooting and pressing the f8 key at the
boot menu. This will load only window and nothing else and then try again to
defrag in this mode. (Ultimately, you can do a repair of your windows that
will restore your system file and fix other problems too without disturbing
your other software or documents, etc.... But save this for last if you
want.)

And if you can and have free space go to
http://www.acelogix.com/download.html and download ace utilities. It easy to
use and is designed to really clean up your hard drives. Browse through the
features before making any selections so you can get the feel of the program.

 

[Guest]

i have just done the command prompt but now i only have 35.3mb left.when the
command prompt finished it said at the end 101228 file(s)95,606,595,017
-- 103458dir(s)30,392,320 bytes free.i dont know what that means but maybe
you will be able to make more sense of it.my drive c seems to be suspended
sheryl

 

[Guest]

ok thank you.i will try that but it might take me a while.

 

[Guest]

sorry for being such a pain but i am new to this.i have done the first lot
you told me to do and it has only gone up to 41.5mb from 35.3mb.where will i
find the safe mode rebooting?

 

[Will Denny]

Hi Sheryl

That means you have about 30 GBs free disk space. If you think you should
have more free disk space, try this command:

dir /a/s >diskspace.txt.

Then have a look at the file in Notepad to see if there are any large files
that perhaps shouldn't be there

--


Will Denny
MS-MVP Windows Shell/User
Please reply to the News Groups

 

[Guest]

Hi Sheryl:

You are NOT being a pain

jumping in at the last here: Frankly, some of which you report makes little
sense. IF* you only have 40 or 50 MB on a 128 or 180Gig hard drive, it is
not going to do much of anything reliably or safely. In fact, I don't see
how the system would let you get so low on free space. You mentioned you
have some music and videos on the hard drive? These can take up lots of
space. If you already have some of these music and video files backed up to
a CD or DVD from which you could recover them later, then delete them from
the computer to give yourself some breathing room. For example, a "typical"
music album will take up 50 - 80 MB or possible more. Video takes up much
more space.

Try to get your free space up to at least 5% this way so the system has some
breathing room and can operate safely. Then you can take a look at the next
step.

A questions: you said in your original post that you had just done a
"recovery". Did you mean a "System Restore"?

Mark

 

[Guest]

hi it wasnt system restore it was a full system recovery back to the
manufacturing state.didnt realise what i was doing until i was half way
through it.the music and videos were on the computer before i done that.i
cant find them now.it is only when i do a virus scan that i see them coming
up.i have been into my backup but dont know where they would be.

 

[Guest]

Hi Sheryl:

Ok. If your virus scanner can read your old data files (music/video) then
they must be on the hard disk somewhere. If you recovered the entire system
to it's factory condition, then you shouldn't be having any disk space
problems at all UNLESS the recovery operation (which is done via a "set of
instructions" installed by the factory when your computer was built)
automatically saved all your data into a backup file. If that is the case,
you now have all your old stuff and all the new stuff on one hard drive.
That's alot of stuff!! The good news is that it is likely a simple matter of
accessing the backup file and choosing which files to "restore" to your "new"
system. The bad news is that this might be a long slow process. BUT* it is
much faster than trying to re-acquire all that music, eh?

At this point, I recommend that you contact the company that manufactured
your computer and describe the situation to them; it's quite likely they have
dealt with this situation many times. If they are unable to help, you might
want to consider taking your computer to a professional-- especially if your
data is VERY important to you.

If either of those two options are not feasible, post back here in a new
post and we will try to help. We will need to know the computer Mfg. and
model among other things.

Mark

 

[Guest]

good point. With such a "large" harddrive, it doesn't sound good to have so
little space. Windows with the program files should only take up anywhere
from 5gigs to 20gigs. It is hard to conceive that there is that much
additional files. 1 cd of music is 600megs. 1000megs is 1 gig. And
accodingly, 160 gigs is used up. It was mentioned that a prior checkdisk
found some bad sectors in the "backup". I am wondering if there are a
multitude of backups and i wonder if maybe some of the backups where also
backup'd..... Probably the backups went bazerk.....

It might help that "all" the music and vid's be moved into a single folder.
By doing this, duplicated files will be seen and deleted.....

the other solution would be to either delete all those music and videos or
reformat the hard drive and start fresh and right by creating 2 partitions.
1 for windows at maybe 50 megs and the other partition with the rest of the
space and compressed.......

 

[Guest]

i have finally found all the videos and music i had on it before.some are not
playing on the media player i have now and some are going to fast that it
doesnt play the whole song

 

[Guest]

so if i was to go into where i found my music and videos and moved them all
to music.would that maybe help

 

[Guest]

yeh, you did ok by locating them. you may need a certain player so don't
delete them yet. or they could have crashed and may not work at all. if you
can you probably should delete them. but if you want to save them, then you
should ensure you have no duplicated files of this type. One way to be
certain is to move all into a single directory. if you have duplicated
files, windows will advise you if you want to move the file into the
directory and overwrite an existing one. you should say yes so windows will
delete the moved file from the original location.

There is something you should check as well - the file size. i don't
remember how many megs is one song, maybe 20 or 30. you should find this out
and use it to compare the other music files. certainly, if some of them is
100 megs then these should be deleted. These are estimate sizes, but i think
you get the idea.....

Another thought is to buy a bunch of writable cd's and transfer most or all
of those music files from the hd onto the cd's. but it sounds like you
would need lots of them if you chose this method.

In addition, if you have "any" backup files, they usually have an extension
of .bak or .bu you should delete them too. After you clean up your
harddrive you can recreate backups that are clean as well......

 

[Guest]

i have deleted the ones that wouldnt play and kept the ones that did.i have
moved the ok ones to my documents before moving them into my music.i have
also found a lot of images i never knew were there so i am trying to delete
them aswell.i have now got 12.0GB free so i think we are getting
somewhere.will let you know when i am finished.it could take a while

 

[Guest]

ok, great. i think that this issue can be closed now since you are on track
with trying to accomplished but were unable to. open a new thread for any
subsequent problems......but i think you learned alot of new things now that
will help you maintain your pc..... ;]