BleepingComputer.com: Plzz Help! Vista Is Draining My Hard Drive Like Crazy

Hi everyone... I'm wondering if someone could help explaining me of the situation i'm about to write cause it's really weird and its getting annoying...


I just bought my laptop 3 weeks ago... hp dv6358se... the hard drive has a partition for the hp recovery so that's untouchable.. now... for like a week now i've started to see how the hard drive has started to drain without me doing anything... right when i got the laptop i passed all the files from my pc which amounted to 44.6 gb...

Now here comes the weird part.. since then... i've just downloaded 1 gb of files... but have seen my HD space drain like in 10 gb!!!!!

According to windows... in the usable partition i have 69.1 gb out of 142 gb left... meaning a usage of 73GB... but i've added up folder by folder of that drive including hidden files... and it amounts only to a usage of 59gb.. so by calculation... as u can see... there's a 14 GB diference that i absolutely don't know where it have gone.. like a week and a half ago after i transfered my files i had like 80gb free and now i have only 69.1gb left.. and i've only downloaded like 1.5gb of files.. So its not like for somebody to say that it's windows itself that takes that space... cause i've seen the progression of the draining of the hard drive..

And the most upfront draining was today.. i started the day with 70.1GB in the hard drive... and right now as i'm writing i just saw that i had the 69.1GB i wrote before!!!!!
And to make it even weirder.. the partition where the HP recovery is located... IT ALSO DRAINED!!!! in the morning it had 484MB left... and now it has 384MB left of space??? What's the deal there?? that's a partition i don't even touch and its losing space also??????

So does anyone has any idea of what's going on and why vista is draining the hard drive so quickly??? and where is those 10GB i've lost??? are those recoverable???

Now i don't if it could be that like 2 weeks ago i made a system restore point... do system restore points get bigger and bigger or something and it's what's consuming my hard drive?? if that were to be the case how could i stop it and recover the lost space...

And well i read on another forum about a guy talking bout his 20gb lost space in vista... and some dude said something bout perhaps the hibernation and sleep mode having something to do about it...

Now since this is a laptop.. i do have used a couple of times the hibernation and sleep mode... so could that be the case?? if so... why is this happening?? and again... can i recover the lost space????

i would really appreciate if someone could help me here cause i'm freaking out... i mean at this rate.. i would be without hard drive space in like a couple of months??????

if someone else has had a similar experience plz share ur cases and solutions if u've had one...

Thanks in advance....

System Restore can consume up to 15% of your hard drive when it's running. I'd suggest a search of your hard drive to find out what's being created that takes up the room. Search "everywhere" not just in indexed locations.

Thanks for the reply.... Yeah i'm aware that System restore takes up space and it did took it's space when I made the system restore point... What i'm worried about is the fact that i'm losing like 100mb per day.. if not more... and i still don't know why... it's a progressive drainig that's the problem...

Concerning ur sugggestion of searching the hard drive... what should i search for?? i don't have an idea what could be taking up space... so what should i be looking for??

And also... Haven't u heard about that i wrote in the previous post concerning a perhaps draining of hard drive due to setting the sleep or hibernation mode??? cause somehow i think that's more of a possibility....

Something is likely to be misbehaving to take up 100 mB per day - and I don't have a clue of what it is. I'd suggest searching your hard drive for files created within the last few days and look at the larger one's to see if you can identify something.

Standby/Hibernation will take up a chunk of your hard drive the size of your RAM in a file called hiberfil.sys - that's where the Standby/Hibernate information is kept - it shouldn't expand beyond that.

You can loose a bunch of hard drive space if you're experiencing repeated memory dumps and the settings for the memory dump are for a full dump. That'll be the size of your RAM also.

ok.... so i finally figured it out... I searched and searched and finally came up to know that the system restore was being the cause of my hard drive lost...

Apparently When i created my system restore point 2 weeks ago apparently it was left on creating system restore points automatically... and it has been creating restore points ever since.. being the last one yesterday.. without me knowing...

So what i did was go to disk cleanup... and erase those restore points except the last one which was created yesterday... and voila... i recovered 10GB!!!!... so problem solved..

but that brings up a new question.. is there a way to create restore points manually without checking that option in the system properties that makes restore points being created automatically... meaning i want to create only one restore point.. and stay with that one... till i decide to create another one... but not the computer doing it for me...

is there a way to do it???

Yes, just go into the System Protection tab of the System Properties and click on "Create Restore Point"

Just a quick question? Is system restore similar to Go-Back that was part of Windows ME? In other words, if I would do something really stupid or the grandson download something really stupid that messes things up.....and I want to revert my HD....would system restore be able to do that?

Sal

System Restore only restores a few things - not a whole PC repair. There are options to backup the entire PC in certain versions of Vista tho'.