What's taking up all the space on my Hard Drive?

AmnesiaDaniel

Honorable
Dec 15, 2013
28
1
10,540
I have a HP ProBook 445 G1 laptop with a 463 GB Hard Drive. Currently it shows that only 58 GB is free out of a total of 463 GB.

UnHR9bc.jpg


However, when I look at the total size of all folders within my C:/ Drive (including all hidden folders), the total occupied space comes out to be only 186 GB.

nazZcSU.jpg


So taking 186 GB as occupied space, I should have 277 GB free right now. But it shows only 58 GB.

What's taking up all the space?

 
Solution
Several things you are not seeing:

hibernation file (equal to your installed RAM)
page file (possibly 1.5x your installed RAM)
System Volume Information (restore points)

vesp3r

Distinguished
im shooting in the dark here but maybe the listed 186GB doesnt include the page file and the temp files also hibernation take some space. Id say try to clean your pc from junk files (old updates, restore points, temp internet and windows files), disable hibernation if its on and see if your space is better
 

AmnesiaDaniel

Honorable
Dec 15, 2013
28
1
10,540


Took a look at this.

hiberfil.sys = 7.19 GB
pagefile.sys = 7.19 GB
System Volume Information = 0 bytes

But even in that case, I should still have 262 GB free.

 

Eximo

Titan
Ambassador
OEM computers tend to have backup/recovery partitions hidden. And I do see an HP Tools drive already.

Open a command prompt as administrator, launch diskpart.

list disk
select disk (probably disk 0)
detail disk

Should show every partition. Most OEMs will only grab about 20-40GB though.
 

AmnesiaDaniel

Honorable
Dec 15, 2013
28
1
10,540


Umm nope. Tried it and it shows three partitions:

Volume 0 = 100 MB
Volume 1 = 463 GB (the main drive)
Volume 2 = 1.85 GB (the HP TOOLS drive)

Volume 0 and Volume 2 aren't taking much space.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


System Volume - You have to look into the Restore Point settings. It almost certainly is not "0".
 

giantbucket

Dignified
BANNED
open file explorer
right-click on the drive
select properties
click disk cleanup
wait
see how much space it says you could possibly free if you remove X amount of junk
scroll through that list to see where the largest chunk is to be gained

post back here with your results!
 

AmnesiaDaniel

Honorable
Dec 15, 2013
28
1
10,540


Initial Scan:
Wfcp0Ot.jpg


Then I did the "Clean up system files" thing:
CnVivjQ.jpg


Apparently Service Pack Backup Files take up the most space (640 MB).
But that doesn't really explain all the occupied GB's.
 

sirmaxx77

Distinguished
May 25, 2011
10
0
18,510


I'm having the same problem. I can't find where 60 GB of storage is going. I did did all the disk cleanup of junk files, system files and even tried the last solution, to clean up old restore files and now I have less space then before. I don't know how that happened.
I ran the prompt as admin and it's showing me ...

diskpart.jpg


Is there any other suggestions?