Has XP stole my hard drive? 1

[mikeydtboy]

After installing windows XP Proffesional (Build 2600) recently I seem to have lost a significant part of my hard drive space which I cannot seem to locate.

When I go into Explorer and check the propities of the C drive it basically tells me that it is nearly full, give or take 30MB! But when checking the individual properties of each folder within the C drive it totals 5.8GB which is confusing me as I have a 8GB hard drive.

When I recently deleted some MP3's from my PC (legal backups and m,y own music of course!) for a while there was two of each song showing in the recycle bin and then after about 5 minutes when I checked again there was only one of each!

Somewhere I seem to be missing a significant chunk of HD or something is duplicated. Any ideas?

Thanks

Mike

 

[tlstrieg]

My first suggestion would be to download a software such as "DiskPie," and check the size of your folders. DiskPie is a free program available on the PC Magazine web site at

http://www.pcmag.com/

. It might give you a clue to what's eating the space.

Just a question - have you done several system restores lately? Once I ran out of disk space on a 10GB drive because I did a half dozen system restores trying to get back to a point where a problem was corrected. Each one at up almost a GB of drive space as I recall.

Also, have you emptied your recycle bin or better yet, run the Disk Cleanup utility? Yesterday I cleaned over 2GB in deleted files and old temp files from a computer.

Good luck,

Tom

 

[mikeydtboy]

Thanks for the advice tlstrieg,

Strange you should ask about the restore thing as yes I did do this about a week ago!

Checked the settings and lowered it to about 500MB so that reclaimed a bit of space.

After doing the disk pie thing I got the following BIG files:

547.75 MB C:\Recycled\Dc45.TMP
288.00 MB C:\pagefile.sys
190.55 MB C:\hiberfil.sys

Although the top one was originally in the C: drive and I have just deleted it, will give it a week to check for adverse effects! It was originally called _NIM4711.TMP and I had no idea what it was!

Can you assist with the others?

Cheers

Mike

 

[FosTech]

mikeydtboy,

The default installation of Windows XP has a few "bells & whistles" enabled that eats up a few gigs of disc space.
*The pagefile is bigger than ever and resides on your "C" drive.
*The Hibernate feature is enabled by default and will reserve 10% of your "C" drive.
*System Restore is enabled by default and will chew up a large portion of each partition.
To learn more about each of the above features, check your help (in the start menu) for more information.

To free up disc space on my "C" drive, I have moved my pagefile to another partition, disabled the Hibernate and System Restore features.
I perform daily backups (from a batch file) to CDRW media.
No need for system restore here.

If you require any more information please let us know.

-Brett

 

[Guest_imported]

- Hibernate reserves an amount of space equal to your amount of RAM. You obviously have about 192 megs of RAM so disable it if you don't use it.

- M$ defaults the pagefile to 1.5x your RAM which is a load of bullsh*t since the more RAM you have, the less virtual memory (or pagefile) you need. Go to your system properties and change it to about 100MB for both Min and Max values so that it doesn't automatically inflate and thus get fragmented. If you play big games or use a lotta huge apps at the same time, and they start bitching, just increase it a notch (to like 150MB or something). Furthermore, if you have two drives (NOT two partitions), split the pagefile across the two drives (say about 50-75MB each) to free up space on the c: as well as giving it a bit of a boost in performance.

- F*ck system restore. It eats up ridiculous amounts of space and who's actually dumb enough to screw up their PC and then need some M$ thing that doesn't even work to restore it?

- Nothing will happen with the .TMP dead. Coz if it was sitting in your Recycle bin for such a long time without bitching, chances are no one's gonna miss it.

- If you use NTFS, the MFT also chows up quite a bit of space. Look at your defrag summary for info on the size of the MFT

- Lower your Recycle Bin space... 2-3% should suffice for an 8gig drive

 

[tlstrieg]

I must disagree with my worthy colleague, eXpiation, on the value of System Resore. I am one of those "who's actually dumb enough to screw up their PC . . . ." (no offense intended or taken, eXpiation) and System Restore has saved me from hours of troubleshooting.

I think where System Restore takes up the space is saving the backup information to "unRestore" in case you don't like where you ended up. My suggestion is that once you're sure that you want to keep the restore point, go in and delete those unrestore files.

Right now, I can't tell you where they are, but I remember they were pretty easy to find with DiskPie because of their size.

Tom

 

[Guest_imported]

lol

Everybody uses their PCs differently I guess

I wasn't talking about the unRestore thing, I was talking about system restore as a whole.

The reason why I'm biased on this issue is coz of the unfortunate days of a 4GB drive and WinME... ugh! I still get haunted by the memories of it eating up more and more space even when I've completely disabled it and I had to boot off a 3.5 inch every once in a while and nail _Backup with deltree... that usually freed up like a gig or so... so bad memories... ugh!

I hope XP does the job better in this regard. Personally, I just back up whatever I need myself so stuff that I don't need doesn't get backed up automatically and thus waste space and if things get REALLY screwed and unbootable, I just boot up recovery console.

And no offence taken, my "worthy colleague"

mikeydtboy, hit us back and tell us how it's going

 

[mikeydtboy]

OK then, thanks for all of the helpful advice above, here's how it went:

Disk Free Space: 1.44GB
Lowered Recycle Bin to 2%: 1.97GB
Disabled Hibernate: 2.16GB
Changed Pagefile Setting: 2.34GB
Empty Recycle Bin: 2.44GB

So there it is a whole GB of space free because of a few little setting changes! Not bad going if you ask me!

Thanks to eXpiation for the tech tips and to tlstrieg for the intial advice!

Just one other thing while we are on the subject. At present I have a browse of two websites for my XP info which I have listed below, anybody recommend any good ones?

Thanks for the help and all the best!

Mike

P.S. YOU WILL NOTICE THAT AT NO POINT ABOVE DID I ALTER THE SYSTEM RESTORE FACILITY, I AM WITH YOU ON THIS ONE tlstrieg THERE ARE STILL A FEW OF US OUT THERE!! ;-) I CAN LIVE WITH THIS ONE!!

 

[mikeydtboy]

OOPS!!

http://www.xp-erience.org/

http://www.wxperience.com/

 

[tlstrieg]

I regularly visit the following forum sites for XP information:

http://www.annoyances.org/exec/forum/winxp

http://www.cnet.com/messageboards/0-7000-7-5740324.html

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/WinXPHelp/

And Tec-Tips, of course.

eXpiation,

I didn't thank you for your original post. It was an excellent desertation on XP & disk space. Like you, I still have nightmares about ME - not sure why I ever upgraded to that one.

You're absolutely correct that nothing beats regular backups. Take care.

Tom

 

[billwalton]

I read the post about backing up XP to a cdrw. Have not found out to do this. Keep getting a illegal track for this disk error. Have tired a couple of 3rd party backup utilities and wound more confused than when I started. My question is this; "Can I use the backup utility in XP to created cdr or cdrw backups directly or do I have to use a 3rd party software? If it is 3rd party, does anyone know what works with XP with out a learning curve like Mt. Everest? I need help with this because I have already had one hard drive die with XP. Real pain to go through setup and install process with about 15 gigs of software installed.

Thanks!!!!!

 

[FosTech]

billwalton,

Yes, you can use the built in backup utility to backup to CDRW media. You must use the backup utility to restore your data when required.
This is why I use a scheduled "tailor made" batch file to do my backup.
The files can be recovered from the CDRW media on any computer that reads the discs!
Drop me a line if you need assistance,

-Brett
fostech@shaw.ca

 

[Guest_imported]

Hey, you sound like you're sorry you offended me or something, tlstrieg... I didn't get offended so don't worry

grr... you rich bastards with your CD writers...

 

[Guest_imported]

OK, peeps, here's a thing on virtual memory (or pagefile). I don't guarantee anything but I don't see how anyone can screw up their PC doing this so here goes

- Fire up task manager and minimize it.
- Now fire up the biggest and baddest possible things that you might ever have running at the same time (within reason) and play around a bit. It's important to play around a bit in each app... load some stuff etc. So if you're me, launch Quack3, UT, Baldur's2, Torment, 3DStudio Max, Corel Draw, Photoshop, Delphi, Outlook, 50xInternet Explorer windows, all at the same time and fire up all the maps, 3D models, websites, movies... but you're not me so don't be that crazy
- Nail everything and go back to Task Manager.
- Under Performance, there's a group called commit charge (stuff is in KiloBytes)
* Total is your current Pagefile usage
* Limit is your total RAM + Pagefile
* Peak is your pagefile usage when you were running all that sh*t at the same time

I'll explain with an example:
Say you have 192MB RAM and so your system defaults your Pagefile to a min value of 288MB (1.5*RAM). 288+192 gives you your limit (this might differ depending on your max value, if any) so that gives you 480MB. Now if your peak was say 300MB, you can safely take off 180MB (480-300=180) from your pagefile, giving you 108MB. You can set this as your Pagefile size. It doesn't need to precise so give it whatever... 100MB will do.

However, note that going too low (<50MB) is not a good idea since Windows still needs some Pagefile no matter how much RAM you have coz RAM is volatile and there needs to be some sort of permanent storage in case of a power failure etc. Also some games/apps need a specific amount of Virtual Memory. This no problem coz you can just up the value at any time if anything bitches to you about not having enough virtual memory. It is also important to keep the Min and Max values the same, no matter what they are, because if the pagefile gets inflated it'll get fragmented and therefore reduce system performance. Again, if anything bitches, you can simply just up it.

This isn't an issue to most people but the space concious wouldn't want the space wasted. It is especially important for people who have, say 1GB of RAM. Coz then windows will reserve 1536MB of pagefile which is TOTALLY unnecessary when about 100MB will do just fine. The inverse is true for people with little RAM (64MB). This defaults to 96MB pagefile. 64+96=160MB total, and that is hardly enough for a big resource hog like XP. They'll need to up it to about 150-200MB.

Hope this helps some people or at least gives them a better understanding of things

 

[Guest_imported]

Another disk space factor that just came to mind:

WinXP and 2K uses WFP (Windows File Protection). This basically replaces any system files with its own if they get overwritten by older or unauthorised files.

This wastes quite a bit of space since it makes a copy of all the .dll and other system files in System32\dllcache. Mine was a couple of hundred megs before I killed it. Now don't go killing it manually... here's what you do:

- Start -> Run and type &quot;cmd&quot;.
- Here you can set the Max value for dllcache size allowed.
- Type &quot;sfc /cachesize=x&quot; where x is the amount in MB for the max cachesize allowed. I use 50MB but it'll all up to preference. Because if the file is not found in the cache, XP gets it from the CD, so there's no real worries of actually deleting files
- But that's just setting the size. Now type &quot;sfc /purgecache&quot;. That'll delete everything in dllcache (and might ask for the CD), but don't worry since windows automatically fills it again with common .dlls, but this time instead of taking up hundreds of MB, it'll only take up 50MB.

Hope it helps... have phun