questions - understanding where my hard drive space is being used up

[2Design]

Ok, I have a 60 gig hard drive and only 12 gigs left

I have done a properties inquiry at several points in Explorer listed below by folder name

12 GB Free space
2.27 GB Business
9.93 GB College
715 MB Personal

10.8 GB Program Files
6.88 GB Windows
---
33 GB approx.

112 MB Miscellaneous Folders

6.6 GB Documents and Settings I believe overlaps some of these

so where are the the other 20+ gb of space

[Duer 157099]

1. A few brief comments

1) Hibernation?

"If you do not use hibernation, make sure you do not have it enabled, which reserves disk space equal to your RAM. If you have a hidden file on the root directory of your C-drive called hiberfil.sys, hibernation is enabled. To remove that file: Go to Control Panel, select Performance and Maintenance, Power Options, Hibernate tab, and uncheck the Enable hibernation box."

2) Page File (Virtual Memory)

http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm

3) System Restore Settings (how much disk space to allocate?)

http://www.theeldergeek.com/system_restore.htm

4) great free program (Advanced Windows Care) that has a "Disk Manager" tool that will tell you exactly how the space on your disk is being used

http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download

(Tools, Disk Manager, Analyze)

Sorry for the lack of elaboration, no time right now, but take a look at those links etc and see if that's helpful

edit: oh, also, is your disk partitioned, that you know of? There could be another partition that you're not aware of?

[2Design]

2. no partition - will look at your suggestions n/t

[2Design]

3. ok the hibernate freed up 2gb - had to use the toshiba power mgmt n/t

[ManiacJoe]

4. The numbers will not exactly match.

Hard drives are marketed in the metric system (1 GB = 1,000,000,000 bytes). The OS measures the drives in computerese (1 GB = 1024 MB = 1,073,741,824 bytes). So, your 60 gig drive is really only about 56 gigs. Formatting the drive will eat up a little more due to overhead. For another example, by "80 gig" drives are only 74.5 gigs using NTFS.

Also, files are allocated disk space using 8K blocks normally. If you have lots of small files, space is getting wasted to some extent in that your 1K file is not using the other 7K of the block. If you do a "properties" on a folder, you will get a report that says "x files of y bytes using z bytes of disk" where z > y.

Even with all of that, your numbers seem to still be coming up a little short....

Hidden and "system" files are by default not shown to you. That might account for some of it.

[Jersey Devil]

5. System Restore files probably

If you are running xp or vista chances are that much of your hard drive it taken up by system restore files. Empty them by using the system cleanup tool (advanced) included with Windows and see what happens.

[ChromeFoundry]

6. check your Windows directory for uninstall folders

used by all windows updates and service packs. You should be able to clean up a lot of unnecessary files with Crap Cleaner:
http://www.ccleaner.com/