Hard Drive Space Missing

[Guest]

I've been reading a lot in the forum about others having drive space loss due
to shadow files, system restore, etc.

I understand that.

Here's my issue. I have new IBM Thinkpad T60 (very nice). It came with a
160 GB hard drive. I added a second 160 GB drive in the Ultrabay.

Well I've put all of my programs and documents on my primary C: drive that
shows a formatted capacity of 142 GB. Windows is now show me only having 19
GB of free space.

I've gone through every folder and find that I'm only using 60 GB of space
for EVERYTHING visible. That leaves a whopping 60 GB of space unaccounted
for.

Surely the shadow files aren't using that! I turned off system restore and
recover part of the 19 GB free (prior to that it was showing 8 GB free).

So, where's the rest of my space? I ran a chkdsk /f on the system at boot
and nothing was found. It's not fragmented that badly either. I ran Disk
cleanup and had it delete files (again to get to the 19 GB free point).

Anyone have a clue?

Thanks,

Scott

 

[Guest]

ScottD,

You can install a utility called SpaceMonger that provides you with a
graphical representation of what's installed on your hard drive. You can
read about it here:

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/faq.php

That site also has a link to the download page. It saved me a lot of
trouble some time ago when I lost a lot of drive space and had no idea of
why. SpaceMonger showed that I had several large crash dump files resident
in C:\Windows. I deleted those and recovered a lot of space.

 

[Guest]

Freddy,

Thanks for the link to the program. I ran it and have found that I have 4
unscannable folders that contain 59 GB of data or 41% of the space of the
drive.

What the heck is that?? Lenovo puts backup apps on a separate hidden
partition so I'm not sure where these folders are coming from. SpaceMonger
won't list a name for the folders.

This drive did not start out this way when I got the system 3 months ago.

Now what???

Thanks!

 

[JW]

They possibly contain restore points.

Freddy,

Thanks for the link to the program. I ran it and have found that I have 4
unscannable folders that contain 59 GB of data or 41% of the space of the
drive.

What the heck is that?? Lenovo puts backup apps on a separate hidden
partition so I'm not sure where these folders are coming from.
SpaceMonger
won't list a name for the folders.

This drive did not start out this way when I got the system 3 months ago.

Now what???

Thanks!

 

[Guest]

Nope, not that I can tell. I've turned off System Restore and rebooted. Ran
SpaceMonger again and same results.

No change in size.

I'm calling Lenovo support next.

Thanks,

Scott

 

[Guest]

ScottD,

I agree with you. That is, ask Lenovo.

 

[Guest]

This is really bizarre. I just rebooted and ran SpaceMonger again. Now I
have 46 Unscannable folders taking up 60.6 GB of space. What a monster!

This laptop is not currently connected to the internet so no upload/download
action is going on behind a firewall or anything.

I'm running my AV software at the moment but it runs all the time in the
background and I doubt it could be something like that.

I was wondering about rootkits. What's in them and can they be seen through
a scan like I'm doing?

Thanks,

Scott

 

[Guest]

ScottD,

Microsoft updates include a malicious software removal tool. You might try
that to see what happens. Just go to the update site and download updates.