No space left on 300GB drive despite only having 90GB worth of "proper" data

[_Rade]

Hi all, and thanks in advance for any replies :)

So I have a 300GB hard disk with Windows 7 on it, I also have a NAS drive for storing my music etc, so my C:\ drive only has to have the OS, my apps and games.

Now a couple of weeks ago I got a prompt from Windows informing me I only have a couple of MB left on C:\, so, I ran disk cleanup and CCleaner to completely remove any browser junk and emptied my recycle bin. This saved me about 1GB.

I know I haven't used anywhre near that, so I opened C:\ in explorer (showing hidden/system files) and had a look at how much data there is. There is 94GB worth of data, which sounds about right, given that I have CS installed as well as a few games, but no music/videos etc.

But when I look at the properties of C:\ it tells me I have only 1GB remaining, so where is the other 150+GB?

I understand windows maintains system restore images, but these will have been removed during disk cleanup, and there is only one restore point, which even if it was a complete ghost of my drive (which I know it isn't!) I should still have 50GB+ left after taking into account space lost to formatting.

I also know windows maintains previous versions of files, but to fill up this amount of space it would have to have 2-3 complete copies of every file, and again, I know it doesn't work that way.

Google just told me to turn off system restore, which shouldn't account for 150GB+ of lost space.

Without meaning to sound really dumb, how can I reclaim my 150GB of free space? I don't care about system restore/file versions as I have my own backup system in place, and in fact never save anything important to my local machine anyway.

TLDR: "My Computer" reports C:\ has having 1GB free of free space, yet the sum of the disk contents on my 300GB disk in explorer is 94GB. Help?

Again thanks for any replies :)

[rch1231]

Hello,

There is a cool tool called jdiskreport which will show you where all of your disk space is being used. You can download it through download.com by CNET.

[_Rade]

Fixed it :)

Cheers rch1231, I checked out that tool and it revealed that there was 165GB of data in C:\$Recycle Bin. Surely not I thought, had a look at to properties of that folder and it was a couple of KB. So did even more searching around and came across a guy having a different problem but it revealed some useful info - props to jcgriff2:

[SOLVED] C:\.bin ??? - Tech Support Forum

It turns out there was 165GB of data in C:\Recycle.bin in the super "administrator" account.

This user is hidden on the logon screen, so to make it appear I had to do this:

- Ran command prompt as admin, type "Net user administrator /active:yes" and hit enter.

- Logged off, then logged on as "administrator" - didn't need a password.

- Made sure hidden files are shown as well as protected operating system files

- Went to C:\$Recycle.bin and there I found 2 folders called "Recycle Bin", one of which, whilst empty in explorer, was 165GB in size. Bingo.

Then I could just delete that folder and job done. Thank you rch1231 and jcgriff2.

Hope this helps someone with a similar problem :)