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Hi all, and thanks in advance for any replies :)

So I have a 300GB hard disk with Windows 7 on it, I also have a NAS drive for storing my music etc, so my C:\ drive only has to have the OS, my apps and games.

Now a couple of weeks ago I got a prompt from Windows informing me I only have a couple of MB left on C:\, so, I ran disk cleanup and CCleaner to completely remove any browser junk and emptied my recycle bin. This saved me about 1GB.

I know I haven't used anywhre near that, so I opened C:\ in explorer (showing hidden/system files) and had a look at how much data there is. There is 94GB worth of data, which sounds about right, given that I have CS installed as well as a few games, but no music/videos etc.

But when I look at the properties of C:\ it tells me I have only 1GB remaining, so where is the other 150+GB?

I understand windows maintains system restore images, but these will have been removed during disk cleanup, and there is only one restore point, which even if it was a complete ghost of my drive (which I know it isn't!) I should still have 50GB+ left after taking into account space lost to formatting.

I also know windows maintains previous versions of files, but to fill up this amount of space it would have to have 2-3 complete copies of every file, and again, I know it doesn't work that way.

Google just told me to turn off system restore, which shouldn't account for 150GB+ of lost space.

Without meaning to sound really dumb, how can I reclaim my 150GB of free space? I don't care about system restore/file versions as I have my own backup system in place, and in fact never save anything important to my local machine anyway.

TLDR: "My Computer" reports C:\ has having 1GB free of free space, yet the sum of the disk contents on my 300GB disk in explorer is 94GB. Help?

Again thanks for any replies :)

Edited by Usernamex235 because: n/a
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Member Avatar for rch1231

Hello,

There is a cool tool called jdiskreport which will show you where all of your disk space is being used. You can download it through download.com by CNET.

Member Avatar for Usernamex235

Fixed it :)

Cheers rch1231, I checked out that tool and it revealed that there was 165GB of data in C:\$Recycle Bin. Surely not I thought, had a look at to properties of that folder and it was a couple of KB. So did even more searching around and came across a guy having a different problem but it revealed some useful info - props to jcgriff2:

[SOLVED] C:\.bin ??? - Tech Support Forum

It turns out there was 165GB of data in C:\Recycle.bin in the super "administrator" account.

This user is hidden on the logon screen, so to make it appear I had to do this:

- Ran command prompt as admin, type "Net user administrator /active:yes" and hit enter.

- Logged off, then logged on as "administrator" - didn't need a password.

- Made sure hidden files are shown as well as protected operating system files

- Went to C:\$Recycle.bin and there I found 2 folders called "Recycle Bin", one of which, whilst empty in explorer, was 165GB in size. Bingo.

Then I could just delete that folder and job done. Thank you rch1231 and jcgriff2.

Hope this helps someone with a similar problem :)

Edited by Usernamex235 because: n/a
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