full hard drive, but the folders inside disagree

[jaffardarkheart]

Hello all. I apologize in advance if this is a "noob" question, but I really have no idea what is happening. My C drive has about 148 GB of space with 144 GB full, according to the properties of the C drive; however, if you open it up and check the properties for each individual folder, they do not combine to more than about 45 GB. It's practically impossible that I actually have 144 GB worth of stuff on my C drive, as the properties on my folders can attest to. Why the discrepency? Thanks!

 

[alpinetech]

hmm. two things come to mind.

-Do you have a firewall and antivirus. Your computer could be conviently setup as an ftp server which stores data. Its happend to many before.

-Note that the allocation size of each cluster could be a high KB rating. Is your hard drive setup as FAT or NTFS?

-Run a hard drive utility
try these programs CCleaner and Disk Investigator

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download.php?det=4191

http://www.majorgeeks.com/Disk_Investigator_d1341.html

 

[Frank4d]

Hmmm... you could have hidden folders taking up space. In My Computer > Tools > Options, under "Hidden files and folders" check "Show hidden files and folders". And un-check "Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)".

If that doesn't find what is taking up space, download "Spacemonger" (Google it). Cool program that shows a graphical representation of hard drive use and which files are consuming space on your hard drive

 

[jaffardarkheart]

I ran spacemonger and it found a folder called "recycler" (which i have never seen before) and it contained about 100 GB of some german movies (and minority report)! I have no idea how those got there(i suspect my cousin), but they are gone now. Thanks a bunch for your help, guys. I now have tons of free space.

 

[Freestone]

The Recycler folder is created on NTFS formatted partitions and will contain a Recycled bin for each user.

 

[PRPhx]

And after finding that much data and deleting it, you might want to do a couple of things
1) open a command prompt and type: chkdsk c: /f. Then reboot your pc. CHKDSK will fix any file/folder problems.

2) After you reboot, I would defrag the hard drive.