What's this eating up my HD space?

[glObalist]

http://members.chello.sk/globalist/disk.jpg

This is a screenshot from Diskeeper, showing a considerable part of my 160GB HD eaten by "reserved system" files. Mind you, D: is not my system partition (which is on C: and doesn't have this "black hole" BTW) and also the swap file is on the other drive's E partition. D is just for installing games and storing files.

So what is it eating up all that space on that partition?

[retsam]

this sounds like its unpartitioned space.....not im not 100% sure..you did a full partition on this drive?

[saturnotaku]

Some of it is probably system restore related.

[glObalist]

Yes, full partition on this drive and System Restore is turned off.

[draagyn]

Recycle Bin maybe? It's default is 10% of disk space, and on a larger drive it can "waste" a lot of room. Try cranking that down to 2 or 3%, and see if that has an impact. Other than that, not sure what else it could be. Anything out of the ordinary installed on your comp that may require crazy swap space like video editors or CAD apps?

[zoomy942]

also, make sure Hibernate isnt enabled

[DaveW]

Sony DRM software :)

[glObalist]

Ummm, no Sony crap, no Hibernate enabled, no Recycle Bin defaults of global 10 percent size, no nothing.

Only thing i found it might be is the NTFS system reserves some space for the Master Boot Record table or something and it gets bigger with bigger volumes.

Still doesnt make sense why its only happening on this partition though...

[zoomy942]

how big is your swap file

[hordaktheman]

Are you sure this "black hole" is being counted as used space, and not free space?

Try going to the drive's root directory, hit ctrl+a and check "properties". That should count all visible files (but not the "missing" space in question), and if the total sum corresponds with reported free space (134gigs combined), it should mean that the space isn't really "lost".

Given that Diskeeper reports 42gigs free, which is roughly 30% of 134gigs, and judging by your screenshot, it looks like that may be the case. It's hard to quantify just by looking at the pic, but to me it looks like "reserved space" + "unused space" could be roughly 30% of the disk.

[zoomy942]

also, try this app for a good visual

http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html

[glObalist]

Hi, my swap is 1 GB fixed but it's on another disk. And yes, the numbers kind of match now that I've looked at all the files on D: - 91GB total of files according to Windows explorer. So the space only SEEMS to be eaten up while it's not. Glad :D

Thanks for your input and the link, I will check what the app has got to say.

[Scunner]

also, try this app for a good visual

http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html

Thanks for posting, Zoomy. Excellent app!

[a12ctic]

this should fix it
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/i386/iso-cd/debian-31r0a-i386-netinst.iso

[einstein_314]

this should fix it
http://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/3.1_r0a/i386/iso-cd/debian-31r0a-i386-netinst.iso
I'm sorry but I fail to see how installing linux will solve his problem.

[saturnotaku]

This thread is 6 weeks old. Nothing left to see here, kids.

[grey_1]

Shouldn't the application event log in diskeeper give you info on what files have been moved and so on? EDIT: Sorry, didn't see the last entry!