Hard Drive Question
I've recently re-installed windows on a new hard drive.
I've kept the old hard drive and have been going through it deleting everything, as I check there is no data.
The windows partition is 30GB, and now I have deleted everything there is, it is still showing 5GB as being used.
I have unticked "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)" in control panel.
So the question is what is on there still taking up the 5GB.
I've kept the old hard drive and have been going through it deleting everything, as I check there is no data.
The windows partition is 30GB, and now I have deleted everything there is, it is still showing 5GB as being used.
I have unticked "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)" in control panel.
So the question is what is on there still taking up the 5GB.
Post edited by murtceps on
Comments
Try ticking the "Show hidden files" as well.
It's not a problem, I could just format the partition. I'm just curious as to what is taking up the space.
http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/index.shtml
(there loads of programs like this, I just stick with this one as it does what I want).
Then use it to analyse your drive and it will show you everything on their, and what size each file is, and what size each file takes up (each file takes up it's own size in clusters, meaning that there could be a (very tiny) bit of wastes space as each cluster can only hold data from one program. But cluster wastage from a lot of files can total a lot of space).
Offhand, I'd say your drive is probably taken up with temporary files, especially form the 'net, and maybe conversion programs (music, video?), plus temporary archiving files that might not have been deleted due to the PC crashing before hand. Treesize will show you where the files are.
A veru good program for getting rid of rubbish on a Windows PC is CCleaner:
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download
which saves you having to manually go through your Windows boot drive looking for waste files.
the best place to get ccleaner from is
www.filehippo.com as the links on piriform's (london company :) ) just point to there
Well I run treesize and analysed the disk.
The 5GB is made up of:-
3.4GB Restore Point Files
1.5GB files (share file ?)
.1 GB recycler.
So thats answered that and i can format it now.
Cheers all
Restore (rollback) files can mount up. To get rid of all but one of them (when you're sure that the latest one is the only one you might need), just open My Computer, Right click the drive (C:, if you want to perform the operation on the boot drive, of course), select DISK CLEANUP on the first page that appears, go to MORE OPTIONS, and in the area where it says "System Restore, You can free more disk space by removing all but the most recent restore point", click Cleanup.
Just right click the folder in Treesize and select Open in Explorer, and it will open the folder allowing you to look through the files to see what they are. Of course you can look through the folder hierarchy in Treesize, but you need Windows Explorer to look through the files.
Don't thank us until you've seen the bill! :p
Seriously though, Treesize is one of those programs it's handy to have on your system, like CCleaner (gets rid of unused files from your machine), VLC (plays almost any movie or sound format you can name), DMEX (lets you do things like open a DOS Box at any folder you like, alter filenames and dates easily, etc), Irfanview (best graphics player I know of), and Foxit (a .pdf reader that's much faster than Adobe Acrobat, though it is becoming bloatware itself now...). And they're all free, so I'd recommend you google for them and give them a try.
When your PC is booting up fine, by the way, you might want to make a disc image of your C: drive. I use Acronis True Image, but there are others, such as HDClone and Norton Ghost. That way, if (when! :sad:) your drive needs reformating then instead of doing a full reinstall, then installing all of the drivers, all of the utilities, etc (and wondering which ones you've forgotten to install!), you just overwrite your C: drive with the contents of the image file, and voila! the PC is back to the identical state to the moment when you made the image file. It really is a time saver.
I think that's the best new feature of Windows for goodness knows.
So now I'm quite clever and taught:
1) I always FULL format new HDD and partitions, no quick/convert;
2) as far as built-in System Restore is... well, as usually, inadequate it's off and successfully replaced by Acronis Home;
(though I had to create 'System Volume Information' file in the root dir to prevent the system from recreating the locked-up folder of the same name)
3) Indexing service is off and AutoUpdate is manual;
4) FSUTIL behavior is configured to have disable8dot3 and disablelastaccess OFF while allowextchar is ON; mftzone depends on the partition role;
5) swap file size is fixed 2GB;
6) install and configure SandBoxIE.
When the system is tweaked I run Raxco PerfectDisk both on and offline defragmentation and make a zero system snapshot - that's it) Having properly configured the system from the very beginning you can really benefit from it.