Harddrive is leaking freespace like crazy

It should show about 596GB total. This is because hard drive manufacturers consider 1000^3 (1000000000) bytes to be in a gigabyte, while Microsoft considers 1024^3 (1073741824) bytes to be in a gigabyte. Thus, what hard drive manufacturers call 640GB has 640000000000 bytes, but Windows divides that number by 1073741824 to get ~596.05GB. Are you sure it isn't 582GB free space (with the other 14GB being taken up by your operating system)?

It should show about 596GB total. This is because hard drive manufacturers consider 1000^3 (1000000000) bytes to be in a gigabyte, while Microsoft considers 1024^3 (1073741824) bytes to be in a gigabyte. Thus, what hard drive manufacturers call 640GB has 640000000000 bytes, but Windows divides that number by 1073741824 to get ~596.05GB. Are you sure it isn't 582GB free space (with the other 14GB being taken up by your operating system)?

Here's a screenshot of disk management....

Ah, well that explains it.

You have 582.97GB on your primary partition, and you have 13.20GB on a backup partition made by whomever you bought your computer from. 582.97 + 13.20 = ~596.17GB.

You can even see where it says Disk 0 is 596.17GB.

Ah, well that explains it.

You have 582.97GB on your primary partition, and you have 13.20GB on a backup partition made by whomever you bought your computer from. 582.97 + 13.20 = ~596.17GB.

You can even see where it says Disk 0 is 596.17GB.

Is it unusual for that much disk space to be taken up by the backup partition? My last harddrive was 500 GB and 465 GB after format. I'm sure the backup partition wasn't that high.

No, it's not unusual, especially since your operating system is Vista.

No, it's not unusual, especially since your operating system is Vista.

K. thanks for your help. I can always depend on GTG.

A bit of an update...

I deleted a bunch of bloatware today and I now have less free space than I did before. What the...????

Vista's system restore feature likes to eat away at your free space. To reclaim this space, click Start, type clean in the search box, and click Disk Cleanup from the search results list. Choose the Files from All Users on This Computer option and click OK. (You'll need to approve a UAC prompt to continue.) Choose the C:\ drive, and wait while Disk Cleanup performs some calculations. On the More Options tab, you'll find the Clean Up... button under the System Restore and Shadow Copies section (it's the second button) that allows you to completely clear out all but the most recent restore point from the space used by restore points and shadow copies.

Edited by stettybet0, 11 June 2009 - 02:48 PM.

Vista's system restore feature likes to eat away at your free space. To reclaim this space, click Start, type clean in the search box, and click Disk Cleanup from the search results list. Choose the Files from All Users on This Computer option and click OK. (You'll need to approve a UAC prompt to continue.) Choose the C:\ drive, and wait while Disk Cleanup performs some calculations. On the More Options tab, you'll find the Clean Up... button under the System Restore and Shadow Copies section (it's the second button) that allows you to completely clear out all but the most recent restore point from the space used by restore points and shadow copies.

Thanks. I'll try it out and get back to you with the results.

I did it and I didn't see any difference in free disk space. What other options do I have???

I just did a defrag of my C Drive and I've lost even more free space. I'm down to 539 GB of free space. Where the [bleep] is all this free space going????????

It's almost certainly due to the system restore feature. It won't indefinitely take up free space, but it will use up to 15% of your hard drive space. In your case, 15% of 596GB is ~89.4GB. You can reduce the space that system restore is taking up by periodically doing the steps I described in my last post.

If you really want to regain this hard drive space, you can turn off system restore, but I don't recommend it. What I do recommend doing is not worrying about it. You still have over 500GB of free space. That's a lot!

It's almost certainly due to the system restore feature. It won't indefinitely take up free space, but it will use up to 15% of your hard drive space. In your case, 15% of 596GB is ~89.4GB. You can reduce the space that system restore is taking up by periodically doing the steps I described in my last post.

If you really want to regain this hard drive space, you can turn off system restore, but I don't recommend it. What I do recommend doing is not worrying about it. You still have over 500GB of free space. That's a lot!

I heard somewhere that I can turn it off (the system restore) and turn it back on and it could fix the problem. Is this true?