Forum Discussion

mikestock's avatar
mikestock
Explorer
Dec 10, 2014

Need help finding elusive files on my laptop hard drive.

I have searched every way I know to find out what is eating up the hard drive space on my HP laptop. When I look at the “C” drive under “Computer” it tells me I only have 70 GB available out of 575 GB. This puzzles me because when searching all groups under the “C” drive I can only locate about 150 GB in use. The biggest group is “Users” at 113 GB followed by “Windows” at 26 GB and “Program Files (x86)” at 7 GB. All other categories are less than 1 GB. Everything I can add up leaves, conservatively, 240 GB unaccounted for.

In the initial setup of the computer I suspect that there is a duplicate set of files that I set up when the computer was new and I was dealing with the “Identities”. Never quite understood what I was doing at that point. I am the only user but I do have one identity set up as non-administrator with a different desktop and a Guest identity that it won’t let me delete.

Can anyone tell me how to search further and find out how to account for the other files that are using 200+ GB of space?
  • 2oldman's avatar
    2oldman
    Explorer II
    Dec 10, 2014
    The first thing that comes to mind is a whole lot of temp files and junk. Right-click on C:, Properties, Disk cleanup. See what that does.

    Another tactic: Look in Windows/temp. You could delete that entire directory and be ok. Check it out on google first if that's not something you want to do. At least in the 'old days' that used to be a huge repository of crap.

    As for identities, I don't know.
  • hawkeye-08's avatar
    hawkeye-08
    Explorer III
    Dec 10, 2014
    I run a program called CCleaner (crap cleaner) that deletes temp files, etc.
  • RoyB's avatar
    RoyB
    Explorer II
    Dec 10, 2014
    I almost think that is your backup drive partition used for recovery... Usually they are marked HIDDEN

    Some hardware drivers only support so many GB and maybe you system doesn't have all of the HARDDRIVE space formated...
  • mikestock's avatar
    mikestock
    Explorer
    Dec 10, 2014
    All temp files deleted, ran disk cleanup last night. Made no difference. I have CCleaner. Haven't run lately but the problem precedes last time. Will run again.

    My Recovery uses just over 20 GB
  • 2oldman's avatar
    2oldman
    Explorer II
    Dec 10, 2014
    Have you looked for .bak files? Cleanup probably finds those, but may be worth a look.

    Have you looked for files by size?

    It's starting to sound like hidden and possibly protected files.
  • mikestock's avatar
    mikestock
    Explorer
    Dec 10, 2014
    2oldman wrote:
    Have you looked for .bak files? Cleanup probably finds those, but may be worth a look.

    Have you looked for files by size?

    It's starting to sound like hidden and possibly protected files.


    I searched through Files by Size and, as I said, they don't come close to adding up.

    I use a free program called WINDIRSTAT to monitor my hard drive.

    Win Dir Stat - Download from CNET.COM


    I tried this CNet site and spent an hour trying to uninstall all the junk ware it added. My Malwarebytes and Nortons went berserk. I think CNet did this to me once before.
  • mikestock's avatar
    mikestock
    Explorer
    Dec 10, 2014
    Found it. Problem was "N360 Backup" left over from when I was using Norton 360. It had gobbled up 300 GB. Should have caught it sooner.

    Thanks all.
  • Fizz's avatar
    Fizz
    Explorer
    Dec 10, 2014
    mikestock wrote:
    Found it. Problem was "N360 Backup" left over from when I was using Norton 360. It had gobbled up 300 GB. Should have caught it sooner.

    Thanks all.


    Now you know why most of us refuse to have that bloat hog on our PCs

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