Member Avatar for toneill

Hi,
Does anyone know if it's possible to find ALL duplicate files on any hard drive without installing specific software for this task?

Terry.

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by hysterik

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Short answer: yes — you can find duplicates without installing third‑party software, but the easiest built‑in route on modern Windows is to use PowerShell (if it’s available on the machine). The safe, practical approach is: 1) prefilter by file size to avoid hashing every file, 2) compute a cryptographic hash for files that share a size, and 3) group by hash to find true duplicates. ’s point about using dedicated utilities is valid for convenience, and ’s idea of using Unix/Linux tools is a good alternative when you can boot a live environment — the PowerShell method below keeps everything on the machine without extra installs.

A portable PowerShell workflow that works across many versions (uses .NET hashing so it doesn’t rely on newer cmdlets):

$Root = 'C:\'      # change to the folder you want to scan
$Out  = 'C:\dups.csv'

function Get-FileHashMd5 { param($Path)
  $s = [IO.File]::OpenRead($Path)
  try { $h = [Security.Cryptography.MD5]::Create().ComputeHash($s); -join ($h | % { $_.ToString("x2") }) }
  finally { $s.Close() }
}

$files = Get-ChildItem -Path $Root -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue | Where-Object { -not $_.PSIsContainer }
$sizeGroups = $files | Group-Object Length | Where-Object { $_.Count -gt 1 }

$results = @()
foreach ($g in $sizeGroups) {
  foreach ($f in $g.Group) {
    $results += New-Object PSObject -Property @{ Path=$f.FullName; Size=$f.Length; Hash=Get-FileHashMd5 $f.FullName }
  }
}

$results | Group-Object Hash | Where-Object { $_.Count -gt 1 } | ForEach-Object { $_.Group } |
  Select-Object Path,Size,Hash | Export-Csv -Path $Out -NoTypeInformation

Notes and cautions: run PowerShell elevated if you need to read system folders; exclude system folders (for example, filter out paths containing \Windows\ or \Program Files) to avoid breaking installs; for very large scans consider hashing only files above/below a size threshold or process one directory at a time. Do not delete automatically — move suspected duplicates to a quarantine folder first and verify program behavior. MD5 is fast and fine for accidental duplicates; use SHA‑256 if you need stronger guarantees.

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Member Avatar for slash49er

Not sure without installing other software. but glary utilities is a great little free program that cleans registrys, etc and there is a built in applet to remove duplicate files. I know there is also a few nice freeware programs available at the pcworld.com website under the downloads sections and then under utilities. Think it is called digital volcano but I am not 100% sure.

Hope this helps

Member Avatar for hysterik

Hi,
Does anyone know if it's possible to find ALL duplicate files on any hard drive without installing specific software for this task?

Terry.

If you decide you'd like to try some software to do this, FSlint works pretty well. It is for Linux, but you might have some success running it through Cygwin.

http://www.pixelbeat.org/fslint/

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