BleepingComputer.com: Where is all my hard disk space going?!?!

Hi everyone,

I'm using Windows XP, and have a 120GB Hard Drive. When I right click on C:/ and go to properties, it tells me that I only have 5 GB of space left. I have searched through all of my folders, and have no clue where all the space is going. I have downloaded JDiskReport and TreeSize to help me diagnose the problem. Interestingly enough, after scanning the entire C:/ drive, the programs only find 35GB worth of files. This would suggest that my hard drive is smaller than it really is, but when I go to My Computer properties, it confirms that my disk space is 120GB.

What is going on!?

Have you run a diagnostic from the hard drive manufacturer? If you have run a chkdsk lately and scanned for errors any bad blocks would be removed and the paging file will take some additional space although that should not be that much space unless the drive is dying. HAve you modified or adding anything lately?

Are there other user accounts on your computer? Could one of them have files in their documents that are taking the space?

You could check for an excessive amount of saved restore points. If you are comfortable that your most recent restore point is satisfactory you can delete all the others to gain space.

See here for a mini tutorial on how to do this: How do I remove all the System Restore points except the recent one?

First of all, thanks to all who have responded! The amount of help you all offer to new forum members is amazing.
I completed the following tasks per your suggestions:
1) Ran CHKDSK - the output suggested that 20 or so index entries were deleted as a result
2) Ran DISKMGR => More Options => System Restore Cleanup - this freed up ~12 GB of space

Although these methods freed up space, I still only have 20GB of free space, and when I run JDiskReport and TreeSize, only 35GB of my 120GB hard drive is still currently being detected.

A couple sidenotes: I have a Thinkpad T43, and recently I have noticed while watching movies, if I shake my laptop just a little bit, the movie will freeze for a couple seconds. Could this be an indicating that my HD is going bad? And, would that result in the lost disk space?

Any thoughts?

Edit: To answer the previous questions, I am the only user on my computer, and I haven't installed anything out of the ordinary except for Cygwin in the past month. (I checked the Cygwin folder, and it's only a few hundred MB's)

This post has been edited by twmaffun: 26 May 2010 - 04:35 PM

After my last post, I ran a defragmentation. After this finished, my free hard drive space went DOWN from 20GB to 13GB. Why in the world would that happen?

Could this be a coincidence, and the real reason for the loss is that the indexes deleted in Step 1 above were reindexed?

Anyone?

Try this:

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

EDIT: Sorry, I just reread the whole thread and I see you already tried jdiskreport.

This post has been edited by Budapest: 27 May 2010 - 12:21 AM

What is listed in Disk Management for your hard drives?

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/309000

Keep in mind file size and the actual space on disk are two different animals. Many cab files and other compressed type files actually occupy more space on disk than the file size reflects. You can check this by going to a few different files of this type to see what I am talking about.