Yesterday I happened to check my hard drive space, and it had vanished without reason. I haven't been storing anything on there that would eat up more space than usual. The capacity is 38.2 GB, and I've always had plenty of space on it. I have tried to find what is taking up the space and cannot find anything. My documents folder, which includes all my music, is currently 15 GB, about what I've always had in there. I know I can move all the music off the hardrive, but that does not explain what happend or get the missing space back. All it would do is free up the space the music is using. I want to get to the root of the problem.

The computer has been acting up - the pointer freezes and I have to reboot (I had figured the mouse needs replacing, but now I'm not sure), and webpages have been spontaneously going back to the previous page without me hitting the back button. Yesterday, when I turned the computer on, a blue screen appeared, said the NTFS volume was dirty, and ran a file check. I've already done just about everything I can think of...searched the internet, cleaned things out, ran scan/recover disk. Can someone please tell me how to find what is eating up my space? I have about 20 GB unaccounted for. I already have "show hidden files and folders" checked and can find nothing that would account for the missing half of my hardrive space. I have only 10% free, and in the past have always been at about 50% without having done anything different to cause this. The computer is 4 years old, Windows XP.

Edited to add: There are no viruses present. The computer is clean, so that is not the problem.

This post has been edited by mintchip: Nov 3 2008, 05:13 AM