Full Hard Drive - what is taking up my space?

[scottew]

I have a Dell Latitude D510 which is running Windows XP Professional SP2 with all the latest updates. This machine has a 40gb hard drive and it only has about 1 gb free space.

I can not figure out what is taking up all the space. I have deleted some old profiles off this machine and looked through everything I can think of.

I'm lost, any thoughts of what might be hogging up my disk space.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Scott

 

[allteltec]

Try download CCleaner for here

http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4191.html

Install and run and see if it helps.

 

[captaincrunch00]

I do this the hard way, but within 3 minutes I can find the culprit, so I consider it an easy way:

Say you have 10 folders in your C:

Right click half of them and go to properties. See how big they are. If it's massive (you'll know if it's one of those folders, it'll be 20GB huge probably) then it's one of those folders. Select only a couple of them and do the properties again. If it isnt, select the other folders and check the size of them.

Now you know what general folder it is (I'm guessing it's the Program Files folder anyway)
Open that thing up, you've got like 40 folders there. Highlight half of them and check the size, if it's not those, check the other ones.
Then check half of the ones you found to have the large folder, and half again, then half again...

You'll narrow down the folder in about 40 seconds each time you drill down a folder.
Soon enough you'll know exactly what folder, and then it'll take about 10 seconds to find out what file it is doing it (my guess is it's a log file that is writing quite often or something).

Then just find out what program is using that file, google it, find out what the file is and go from there.

It sounds complicated, but just check half the folders, then half of that number, then half of that... until you get down to one folder. It's cake and takes about 3 minutes to run through an entire server.

 

[scottew]

captiancrunch, I have done that but the 10 or so folders on the c:/ drive only add up to about 8gb's. That is why I am so confused. The numbers just don't add up.

 

[linney]

In the Control Panel/ Folder Options, make sure you can "see" both Hidden files and Protected System files.

Run through all the suggestions in these threads, and the links leading from them.

Relocating Hard Drive Capacity and File Compression
thread779-939540

Hard Disk still full after deleting large files
thread779-1136701

 

[2ffat]

Simple trick to find the largest files on your hard drive. Do a search for *.*. Then order by size.

If nothing pops out then the problem may be hidden or rootkit folders. Look at

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html.

James P. Cottingham
-----------------------------------------
[sup]I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229![/sup]

 

[Primis]

If you've checked the usual culprits (temp. internet files, temp. install files, logs, system pagefile, have defragged, etc) and are still lost as to what's using up so much space, here's a free tool that will show you exactly what is using up space and how much space it is taking up in proportion to everything else:

http://windirstat.sourceforge.net/

Or, here's another free alternative that's been around a bit longer:

http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/

Both will show you grpahical representations of your disk(s). The bigger the blocks/squares shown, the bigger the files/directories.

Good luck.

 

[captaincrunch00]

You say that your entire C drive adds up to 8GB? And you say a 40GB drive is nearly full?

Your C drive is most likely your entire computer, so everything on your computer is only 8GB, unless you didnt check the files in the root of the C: as well. You checked all of the hidden files and folders too, correct?

Do you have a D drive or partitions or anything?

 

[toolman59]

Run Disk Cleanup, it will tell you how much rubbish it can remove, but make sure to select the "More Options" tab and select the "Cleanup" button to remove old system restore points, these can hog a lot of space.

Toolman59

 

[WyldeCarde]

Another usual suspect is print spool files, in true microsoft fashion once one fails to delete it never deletes them again, these can be found at:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\PRINTERS

Also how do you know what size drive you have? Is that from explorer? so it is literally telling you it is 40 gb and 39 are used?

I'm wondering if you just know you have a 40 gb drive from the specs and some of it is not partitioned.

 

[PRPhx]

As mentioned you need to delete the .bak, .tmp, .log files and other junk. You say you have all the latest patches. Did you delete all the upgrade folders that get added when you do an upgrade?


I like a program called System Mechanic (

http://www.iolo.com).

You can download it, install it and run it for 30 days for free, no crippled software. It will find all your junk (including 0 length files), clean your registry, etc. Then do a chkdsk c: /f and defrag your hd.

 

[mlconley]

All of your windows updates will have uninstall folders in the windows directory and that will eat up drive space. How much RAM do you have? your windows swap file will eat up drive space like no tomorrow.

Also, if you have hibernation enabled, that will chew up at least as much drive space as you have ram. I have 2 Gigs in my lattitude. fast user switching I suspect pages all kinds of crap out to the disk, chewing up loads of drive space.

 

[Diancecht]

Humm, the OP didn't answer yet, but I bet for old CD compilations for burning.

Cheers,
Dian

 

[scottew]

Hi guys, Sorry I did not get back to all of you earlier. I tried a few of the suggestions, but nothing worked. I finally got so frustrated that I just wiped out the machine and reformatted it. This laptop is one of our Sales people and this is what they get for loading all kinds of games and crap on the computer.

Oh well, thank all of you for your suggestions.

 

[LWComputingMVP]

For future reference, the tool DIRUSE from Microsoft does a great job at illustrating how much space is used by various folders. It's a command line tool that will display usage in all subfolders and unlike any third party tool I've seen, it can include hidden folders and folders that you do not have permission to (including System Volume Information). You can download it from here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...76-9BB9-4126-9761-BA8011FABF38&displaylang=en