How do I account for all the memory used on my hard drive?

Question

My computer says that I have 100 gigs of space used on the hard drive, but I can only account for 60 gigs in all my folders. Where can the other 40 gigs be? I know the registry could be using some, but 40 gigs?

Answer 1

Confusing ain't it??? Depends on what you use to find out this info. If you look one place, it'll give you the total used up, if you look at it inside Windows, you'll get another figure because Windows automatically sequesters some amount of space for its use.

My recommendation is that you not worry too much about finding every last gb, but concentrate on keeping old and useless files off and defragging often.

Answer 2

A few things to consider
1. Have you defragmented the drive? Clean up the drive first.

2. If you have more than one user account, there may be hidden files and folders.

3. In folder options for windows explorer, are the system files hidden?

4. It couldn't account for 40 gigs, but Pagefiles, just like regular files on the drive can become fragmented. It is possible for a corrupted pagefile to allocate enormous amounts of disk space. To fix this, set the virtual memory to zero and reboot.This disables the pagefile. Do another defragmentation after disabling it to release the disk space. You can then reset the virtual memory to it's previous settings, reboot and the system will build a new one.
5. Are there any other partitions that are either not formatted or formatted to FAT32?
Best guesses, hope they help.

Answer 3

Memory and disk space are two very different things!

Ensure that your user has access to all files and directories, then run a disk space scanner such as this one:

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/index.html

Answer 4

The formatting of the disk takes up some of the space. Next are the system files, like the paging file and other hidden files. After that I dunno.