Vista - 20gb on hard drive but where?

I have two 50gb drives on my laptop one is empty and one has 47gb showing. My
documents has about 24gb there are a couple of gb on all the other files but
there is over 20gb i cant find. Any ideas anyone
Regards
Alan

Alan

Perform a disk cleanup. It's likely that most of this space is being used by
system restore and other temp files.

Go to Start and type: disk cleanup in the Search Box. In the Results,
click Disk Cleanup.

Select "Files from all users on this computer". Select the drive where Vista
is installed and click OK. The utility will calculate the space used.

In the results all of the temp files that are safe to delete will be
checked. Click the More Options Tab, in the System Restore section, click
the Cleanup Button. You will get a prompt asking "are you sure you want to
delete all but the latest restore point", click the Delete Button. Click OK.
Another prompt will again ask are you sure, click Delete Files.

This will delete all temp files and all but the latest system restore
points.

Check the used space on the drive again.

--

Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP
Windows Shell/User


"Alan" <Alan@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:13B09D5A-B55B-47F7-BBD9-59E450DC061B@xxxxxx

Done all that and managed to get rid of 3.9gb but still about 19gb on the c
drive i cant find

"Ronnie Vernon MVP" wrote:

Hi, Alan.

Open an Administrator:Command Prompt window. (Run cmd.exe as
Administrator.) This will help you look behind the GUI to see what is going
on back there. Of course, like any other powerful technique, it can do at
least as much harm as good it you're not familiar with it, so be careful.
Many of us cut our computer teeth on (or before) MS-DOS, so these are second
nature to us, so we may forget to mention some obvious(?) steps; if you have
questions, just ask.

Type Dir C:\ /s/a - and then get a cup of coffee. On a big drive with lots
of files, this could take a half-hour or more! To interrupt it, press
Pause/Break, or Ctrl+C, which is the old version of the same thing. In
Vista, the Command Prompt window is scrollable, so use the scroll bar to see
a lot (but maybe not all) of the contents that scrolled by so quickly.

The Dir (directory) command lists the contents of the specified directory
(former name for what is not called a folder). By specifying C:\, we are
starting in the Root ("/") of Drive C:. The /s switch lists all subfolders
and their contents; the /a shows all files, even those with Hidden and
System attributes. Type Dir /? to see a mini-Help file showing all the
switches and parameters available.

Now that you've seen more than you wanted to <g>, it's time to narrow it
down a bit.

First: Dir C:\ /a - just remove the /s and see all the files in the Root.
Two files you should probably see are hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys, each
about as big as your installed RAM. Hiberfil.sys is your hibernation file;
until you disable hibernation, it can't be deleted or moved from C:\.
Pagefile.sys is your paging file; this can be moved to another drive; if you
need instructions, just ask.

Second: I'm not sure what comes second, because I can't see your computer.
And I know that you've already done some of the things that I would suggest
and that Ronnie has advised. But you can go exploring a piece at a time by
adding parameters to the Dir command: Dir C:\Temp /s/a When you find
something that you are SURE you don't need, you can delete it. And if you
find something that shows up WITH /a, but not without that parameter, then
you can be pretty sure that it is part of your unexplained or "invisible" 19
GB.

A partial explanation, which can sometimes have more impact than we expect,
is "slack space". As you probably know, a single-byte file uses a whole
"cluster" or allocation unit for storage. The default cluster in NTFS is 4
KB, so 1,000 single-byte files would use 4,000 KB (4 MB), even though a
listing would show only 1,000 bytes used. Actually, NTFS is smarter than
this, but the general idea is still valid. The point is that small files
use much more storage space than just the number of bytes reported by Dir.
If your WLM mail store is on C: (and it is, by default), then there may be
thousands of .eml and .nws files - mostly smaller than 4 KB each - creating
just this situation.

RC
--
R. C. White, CPA
San Marcos, TX
rc@xxxxxx
Microsoft Windows MVP
(Running Windows Live Mail beta 2 in Vista Ultimate x64 SP1 beta v.275)

"Alan" <Alan@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:F9999205-81DF-4F8D-8791-E3C8D0C5A5E3@xxxxxx