Where's my HD gone?

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I know mate, which is why I said ...

I would advise you to be wary of offering advice that isn't strictly true. That's not meant in an unkind way, but I personally prefer not to say anything at all, unless I'm pretty certain about it.

 

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This is surley the properties of one drive , either physical or logical, you cant view properties of 2 drives ( logical or physical) at the same time, and get these results?

IMO he has got 47gb of data on his drive, and has 53 gb of space left. Its a no braining to be honest.

 

Does that not only apply to Volumes - not basic disks.

 

I think the OP's best best is to initially follow Mr Cheek's advice and try running WinDirStat which he linked in his post. That is a great way to get an overview of what's installed on your system and any very large files will be immediatley obvious as it gives a proportional graphical representation of the hard drive.

When I read the OP it did occur to me that it could also be a large swap file that isn't being moved by the defrag process.

 

Thats why I though thats got to be the partition size thats been used.

That would be a very big swap file.

 

Not sure what to mean tbh Drum dude, could you reword that.

You can actually extend primary partitions and also logical drives (within an extended partition) on Basic Disks providing that it's NFTS, not a system or boot volume, and it's extended into contiguous, unallocated space. Obviously it's much easier if it's a volume on a dynamic disk.

 

Honestly, i don't understand what you mean m8? If the op is looking at the properities of his partion which state he has used 47gb of data and has 53 gb free, then thats what whe has, irregardless of how many other partions he has on on that 1 physical hard drive, if that partitions properties state that, then thats what he has used and has available to use.

 

sorry mate, I included too many 'nots' into my last post. I meant dynamic disk, but you answered the question anyway. cheers

 

If the files are located somewhere within My Documents as was suggested by the OP, then WinDirStat is what you should be using to try and getter a better view of exactly what space is being used in different areas of the hard disk.

Have you done any DVD copying or anything like that? Some programs like to use temporary folders within your local profile in order to store DVD images etc.. when you copy them. They don't all tidy up after themselves though, so you could have many gigs worth of files you can simply just delete lurking in there somewhere.

 

It can't hurt, but it's not very good at clearing temporary files in my experience. Or rather I should say the designated folder that contains the temp files in the current users profile. I have seen it chock full of stuff many times right after a disk cleanup routine.

My preference is to allter the two environment variables in XP that point to the users profile, and put a fixed path in, instead. Point it at c:\tmp as an example, then all temp files from all users reside in a single location which makes for much easier house keeping.

 

ccleaner does a better job than disk cleanup.

 

Thnks very much CC worked!! It found 35GB of temporary fliles etc! "Modey" tes I have made many copies of DVD's on my laptop, I also had a lot of RAW images on there from my Digital SLR with each picture 12MB..........which i had totally forgot about, sorry guys
When i deleted all my images etc into the recylce bin then emptied it why didn't I get my space on my HD back?

Aagain, sorry I'm a technofobe, I'm ok with Photoshop & Digital SLR's/RAW files etc but computers themselves baffle me completely sometimes D Thanks again for all your posts & suggestions, nice to see my HD say 91GB of HD left

Martin

 

You should have got some space back. But when you do something like save a picture or something temporary files are created, if you delete that picture that is all your deleting. The temporary files and even the path to the picture can still be on the system which obviously takes up space.

CCleaner does a fantastic job of getting rid of everything, always run it after uninstalling a program or deleting a file.
or you can run disk clean up.

 

I might try this CCleaner out, I hadn't heard if it before this thread. Every cloud and all that ...

 

it is good, I heard of it through the Mike Meyers AIO guide.

 

No problem. Glad to hear it.

Beats my record of 5.5GB then!

 

i heard about it from Certforums!

 

CCleaner does a fantastic job of getting rid of everything, always run it after uninstalling a program or deleting a file.
or you can run disk clean up.[/QUOTE]

I will for sure & thanks again everyone

Martin