Hard Disk Disappearing

Hi,

My problem is such:

1. I have a 120GB hard disk that shows a capacity of 105GB. No problems there--I understand that there's a restore partition and GB vs a billion bytes

2. My hard disk says that 54GB is being used.

3. However when I drag and select all folders in my C: and click properties, I only see 28GB of usage. This leaves an unaccounted-for 26GB.

I've just run disk cleanup and cleaned up my shadow copies before verifying all this. Besides at a MAXIMUM, system restore should only eat 15% of my hard disk (18GB)

What explains this loss? How do I fight back and regain my hard-earned gigabytes?

Thanks,
Alex

wow that's horrible...i know vista 32 eats up ram..but HDDS..hmm don't really know what to say..try doing a disk defragment

You showing all hidden folders? Also, does that include anything that might not be in there? I'm not sure if all OS stuff would show up (not really my area of expertise).

Thanks for the tip, Fighting Scallion. I just tried showing hidden files (I had forgotten you could bring up those XP options) and my usage went up to 34 GB when doing select all->properties.

I guess this included a bunch of sys files, my hibernate cache, and system restore.

Now I'm only down to an unaccounted 20GB!

-alex

could be system restore thats hogging that much space.

Also, page file. That's probably between 2 and 4 GB.

hi could u plz tell me how u got the space cos i have the same problem....