Solved I have only 5.28G free of 283G??

[Kyu42]

I promise I read through this whole thread before posting this, and I apologize if the answer was there and I simply don't have enough knowledge to have seen it.

I own (or am owned by) a Toshiba Satellite A305-S6905, purchased refurbished direct from Toshiba, with a 320G hard drive running Vista Home Premium 32-bit with SP2. Unfortunately for me, running WinDirStat suggests that I've hit the infamous "127G limit", and while I am a reasonably intelligent layperson I am in no way a computer expert, or even semi-pseudo-expert, and have no idea how to fix this. I spent much of this afternoon Googling this all over the place and finally wound up in this forum.

I'm not sure that deletion/extension is actually going to solve my computer's take on the 127G limit. Disk Management shows me an apparently normal-looking 283.90G C:/ partition, with only about 14G partitioned off to either side (1.46G to the right of C:/, 12.73G to the left). Screenshot's attached. Right-clicking on the leftmost partition gets me no options; I can shrink the C:/ partition, but that's it; I can delete the rightmost partition, but that's it.

I've deleted all data I'd put on the hard drive (though not the programs I've added) but my laptop remains convinced that I have only 5.28G free of 283G.

Help would be very much appreciated.

 

[Kyu42]

Addendum: ran Disk Defragmenter last night and now have a whopping 14G free. Updated screenshot attached (no changes - just FTR).

 

[patio]

Q: has the most space....i suggest moving what you can to there...

Best candidates for this are pics' music and videos.
Do not attempt to move Programs or you'll wind up with a mess.

PS: Not sure why they set that primary HDD up that way...you may want to consider creating an image of the C: drive and burning it to DVD and starting over to utilise the whole drive as 1 partition if that's what your after.

 

[Brink]

Hello Kyu, and welcome to Vista Forums.

This may be an unusual large reservered allocated space on that hard drive for the virtual page file (8GB at most usually) or for max storage of system restore restore points (10% to 15% of your HDD at most usually). You might check both of these to see if they may have a large amount of disk space allocated for them.

Hope this helps,
Shawn

 

[Kyu42]

Patio - Thanks for the suggestions. Unfortunately, I've already removed all pictures, music, and video from my hard drive; the only visible files left are program files and system files, so that's not going to solve my problem. Also, the issue does not appear to be that I've filled up the hard drive; the issue appears to be that for some reason the computer isn't even seeing most of it. Q:/ is an external portable hard drive; while I can and do use it for file storage, I don't want to give up on getting my actual hard drive space back.

Shawn - Thanks for the suggestions. I'm on my work computer right now; I'll try both of the things you suggest when I get home and will post to this thread with the results.

 

[whs]

Run WinDirStat ( WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics ). It will give you a breakdown of what's on the disk. But it will not show the shadowstorage. That you get with vssadmin list shadowstorage in elevated cmd.

 

[Kyu42]

whs - Thanks for the suggestion. I've actually already installed and run WinDirStat, and it sees only 127G of the hard drive (I'd attach a screenshot, but I'm at work and away from my laptop right now). I don't know what shadowstorage is or what elevated cmd is; can you enlighten me?

 

[whs]

OK, shadowstorage is the part on the disk that is reserved to store the Restore Points that are automatically written by the system. It can take up to 15% of your C disk (sometimes even more).
For elevated cmd (Command Prompt) got to start > All Programs > Accessories > right click on Command prompt > "Run as Administrator" (elevated). Then you type the vssadmin list shadowstorage. Look for C and you will find 3 numbers (used, allocated, maximum). It is allocated that shows you what the system has currently grabbed. Maximum is the size it will ultimately grab before reusing the space. Here is a little write-up I once made for a better understanding:

With each install and uninstall, Vista writes a shadow (restore point) of about 1GB - plus one is written each day. For that purpose Vista reserves 15% of your OS disk partition and allocates/uses it as needed.
Find Command Prompt (in All Programs > Accessories > Command Prompt), right click on it and Open as Administrator. Into the little black window type VSSADMIN LIST SHADOWSTORAGE and hit ENTER. It will show 3 numbers:
Allocated - that is the amount that it has grabbed from your OS partition at this time
Used - this is the amount currently used
Maximum - this is the ultimate amount it will allocate and use
Once you reach "maximum", it will reuse the space deleting the oldest shadows for the storage of the newest shadows. With e.g. an appr. 200Gb of OS partition you should expect a maximum of 30GBs that are reserved for the system and that you cannot use. If your OS partition is larger or smaller, the shadowstorage will be accordingly (always 15% max.) But the restore points (shadows) are required the day you need to do a system restore.

PS: the WinDirStat screenshot would be interesting to see.

 

[Kyu42]

Shawn and whs - The shadow storage appears to have been the problem. For some reason, Vista had been set (not - knowingly - by me) so that the maximum shadow-copy storage space was unbounded. By the time I ran the cmd prompt about ten minutes ago after your suggestions below, Vista had used 235G of the 237G that had been allocated. I resized it to 3G per a link from Shawn's system-restore tutorial linked below. Oddly, that got rid of all the system restore points, so I ran a manual one to give the system something to start with before the scheduled ones begin again.

Screenshots attached, in case they're relevant: WinDirStat run tonight before the resize, the elevated-command-prompt box with before/after-resize/after-resize-and-manual-restore lines, and WinDirStat run tonight after the resize.

I'm extremely grateful to y'all and to this forum.

 

[whs]

I am glad you got that one sorted out. Yes, if you resize the shadowstorage, it will flush it completely. But don't worry, pretty soon you will have a few - probably not more than 3 or 4 with 3GBs of allocated space. With the size of your disk, I would recommend 10GBs. You will probably never use all that diskspace anyhow.

PS: This is the first time I have seen "unbounded" shadowstorage. I learnt something, thanks.

 

[Brink]

Kyu,

I'm happy to hear that you got it sorted out. I have never heard or seen this being set to "Unbounded" before as well. Thank you for posting back your results.

 

[whs]

In Win7 it is actually possible to set the shadowstorage to 100% - I assume that is 100% of freespace. Else it would make no sense.

 

[Brink]

Thank you Wolfgang.

Ah, yeah it would have to be a setting like that one in Windows 7 somehow for Vista. I'm just not sure what the command would be for it Vista though.

 

[whs]

I think we should file it under "oddities".