Hard Drive out of space cannot find whats taking up space

See this web page:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/07/01/disable-and-turn-off-system-restore-shadow-copy-in-windows-vista/

Crucio666, any feedback?

i've been able to free up some space by disabling shadow copying but now it's 34gigs free out of 143 gigs and i only have about 70 gigs of data......... still trying to figure out where this other 40 gigs is

Have you run a drive cleanup?

yes, that only get's rid of temp files etc, it only added up to like 20mbs of stuff since it's a new pc

Have you tried WinDirStat or TreeSize?

so i ran windirstat.

it says my C drive is 65.9gigs.

i have a 143 gig drive. I should have 73gigs free but it says i only have 34 gigs free.........this is so weirdo........what can it be?

Right-click on "My Computer", go to "Manage" and "Disk Management".  What does it show for disk size there?

capacity: 143.91gb
Free: 32.42gb
22% free

anyone have anymore ideas?

Was WirDirStat ran with Administrative credentials?  If not, the areas taking the space may not have been accessible by WinDirStat.

If WinDirStat cannot find the space, I am at a lost personally to investigate where your space went....except to say that NTFS does report free space.  You might want to try running "chkdsk /f" from an elevated prompt and inspect what it reports for free space before and after running chkdsk.

In vista i only have 1 user account that is a administrator and that is what i ran it with.

C:\Users\Crucio>chkdsk
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is SW_Preload.

WARNING!  F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.

CHKDSK is verifying files (stage 1 of 3)...
  208256 file records processed.
File verification completed.
  87 large file records processed.
  0 bad file records processed.
  2 EA records processed.
  44 reparse records processed.
CHKDSK is verifying indexes (stage 2 of 3)...
  802635 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
  5 unindexed files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying security descriptors (stage 3 of 3)...
  208256 security descriptors processed.
Security descriptor verification completed.
  21755 data files processed.
CHKDSK is verifying Usn Journal...
  35184840 USN bytes processed.
Usn Journal verification completed.
Windows has checked the file system and found no problems.

 150904831 KB total disk space.
 120338088 KB in 186337 files.
     84524 KB in 21756 indexes.
         0 KB in bad sectors.
    314143 KB in use by the system.
     65536 KB occupied by the log file.
  30168076 KB available on disk.

      4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
  37726207 total allocation units on disk.
   7542019 allocation units available on disk.

Above is the chkdsk...........

Puzzled. :/

i think when i first got the laptop it wanted to do a backup of the system........i think it made a backup and put it somewhere thats hidden!

does windirstat show super hidden files...like the olk folders?

It should if you run it as an administrator

Figured it out my friends.

IBM Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery ran a backup on the 17th of October that was 47 gigs.

It is saved to C://RRBACKUPS

but that folder is "super hiddeN" and i am denied access to it. i'm trying to get that backup deleted.

thanks for your suggestions.

got it deleted, i'll spread the points around as you all had great ideas.

Try this: http://www.tempusfugit.ca/norobots/rrutils.html

Glad you figured it out...wondering if you really had one partition as shown in the Disk Management view...

yea, i double checked, it's 2 partitions, one for the C drive and one that is 5 gigs for the recovery process.
I wouldn't have figured it out if it didnt just prompt me for another backup,

thanks again.