I have just reinstalled XP over an old installation. everything works fine but the drive is using about 24Gb for the installation and a few old files

According to properties there is:

3Gb in the windows directory
2Gb in program files
about another 2 Gb in various other folders

I know there is about 2Gb for the pagefile and 10% of the drive for Recycle
Does anybody know where the other 8+ Gb has gone. As far as posisble I have cleaned out old identities in Document & Settings

Equipment

Asus P5B
Intel q6600
2 Gb Elixir 800 memory

Seagate 8-Gb scsi
2 200 Gb Maxtor Sata 2 drives
2 DVD RW drives
Nvidia 7600GT

Thanks

Do you have a Dell or some kind of brand computer?

They generally take 8GB for their software restore software - you'd have to go in and delete the partition to get it back but you should still be able to see it.

Also, when you buy a 80GB HDD or 120GB, its not really that amount. It will be smaller than stated. 120,000,000,000 is not 120GB technically.

1 kilobyte = 1024 bytes
1,024,000 bytes = 1 MB
Follow it up and you'll see where space is lost with that extra 24k per MB.

Thanks for the reply but this is a generic machine. I am talking about used drive space which is of the order of 22Gb with fully updated Windows XP, standard programmes such as AVG and Office 2007. As I said Office accounts for 2Gb, other data files another 2Gb and allowing for everything I seem to have lost about 6-8Gb which I assume are in hidden or system directories some from old packages. Does nobody have any idea where the most likley culprit directories are?

System Restore is possibe, volume shadow copy is another possibility.

Windows Updates store their information as well in the root (C under funky key names could also do it.

Its hard to say without actually looking at the computer.

I seem to remember an article referring about your situation in Windows Secrets newsletter. Google Windows Secrets, try them.

Thanks Riser, The crap was in the System Volume Information and was my old system restores. Because I had re-installed the folder was inaccessible eevn as the new administrator and appeared to be 0 bytes. Once I changed the permissions it was actually 14Gb of which 8Gb were old restores. Deleting the old restore points released the 8Gb. It's easy to forget that when you re-install without reformatting that some folders won't naturally be available to you.