40 gig of hard drive space unaccounted for

[jhkaska]

I seem to remember this being discussed here a couple of months ago but my search couldn’t locate it. So I’ll ask again and apologize if you have to repeat for my sake.

I have loaded much of what was on my 30 gig hard drive from my old Dell onto my new T60P. I had WinXP professional on the Dell, same as on the T60P and all of my files only occupied about 20 gig of the 30 gig hard drive, leaving 10 gig of free space.

The T60P has a 100 gig hard drive and one of the partitions is called IBM_Preload. It has a capacity of 88.44 gig with 61.2 gig of used space and 27.14 gig of free space. So what was taking up about 20 gig on my old Dell is now taking up about 60 gig on the T60P. I looked at all of the files listed in the IBM_Preload disk and they total about 20 Gig, same as what showed on my old Dell. The major users are Documents and Settings, 13.3 g, Program Files, 3.28 g, Windows 2.11 g and IBM Tools 1.53 g.

I thought that perhaps system restore was the culprit but it looks to me like the maximum amount of disk space that system restore can use is about 11 gig. And if I move the slider down to 4 gig for system restore, it has no effect on the above hard drive totals.

So what is using the unaccounted for 40 gig of my hard drive? And can I reclaim it somehow? Thanks for your help.

[southy]

I found out yesterday in my T60 that this backup system that comes with it (I don't know what it's called, so I'm not sure if this is what you refere to as 'system restore') managed to reserve 30GB for a backup that apparently was never completed.

I did:
- press thinkvantage button
->backup & restore (or sth like that)
-> display backups / delete the backups.

Not sure if this helps but you can try.

[jhkaska]

Thanks, Southy, for your input. I followed your advise and went to the Rescue and Recovery program and opened the part that says Create and Review backups. It showed a backup size of 36.9 Gig so this must be where my lost 40 gig is. It is apparently a hidden file and I am still trying to figure out how to look at it and perhaps delete it. I am a little confused why I should even have this program since I use Acronis to clone to a second drive. Perhaps not as often as I should so this Rescue and Recovery program could save me when I procrastinate too long between clonings.

Concerning the Windows program, System Restore, that I referred to previously, I went to Control Panel/System/System Restore to adjust the Hard Drive space allocated to it. I tried to use System Restore a couple of weeks ago and had problems making it work. I didn’t try to trouble shoot it at the time but now I am wondering if perhaps the IBM Rescue and Recovery program is interfering with it.

I am still trying to sort this all out and have more questions than answers. But at this point, I am leaning toward getting rid of Rescue and Recovery and gaining back my 40 gig of hard drive space. Or perhaps limiting the amount of hard drive that is allocated to Rescue and Recovery, as can be done in System Restore. But I don’t see any way to do that. Has anyone put an upper limit on the amount of Hard drive space that Rescue and Recovery can use? Any comments on any and all of these issues welcome. Thanks for your input.

[astro]

Well it seems Jhkaska's question has been answered... I have another question. Have a look at this picture:

See the diagonally-striped (green/white) block of data? Diskeeper says it is "Reserved system space".

What is it?

Is it the "hidden partition"? How does that make sense -- for one, it is a separate partition and two, it is not included in the drive capacity (90,409MB). Admittedly, I think the hidden partition gets mounted onto one of the system folders ("C:\RRbackups"?) and this might confuse DKlite... ?

[jhkaska]

Astro, I looked at the same screen for my hard drive and the reserved system space only takes up about 5% of one line, or about 3% of what yours shows. Not sure if this helps you. It isn't clear to me that this even includes the hidden partition. But if it does, my hidden partition is 4.71 gig, 17% free and the rest is 88.44 gig.

[astro]

Jhkaska, thanks for the reply -- that is very interesting. Sounds like you and I both have the factory setup... So what the hell is going on with mine?? I will have to do some more research.

[astro]

Help helps.

Green-striped areas (on Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 systems only) show space on the volume reserved for expansion of the MFT. This space is reserved when a volume is formatted, and cannot be used by applications, including Diskeeper. However, the operating system will write files to this area when the volume becomes extremely full and no other free space is available. Windows provides the capability for Diskeeper to move files out of this reserved area, but does not allow Diskeeper to move files into it. These areas appear only on NTFS volumes.

[christopher_wolf]

Well it seems Jhkaska's question has been answered... I have another question. Have a look at this picture:

See the diagonally-striped (green/white) block of data? Diskeeper says it is "Reserved system space".

What is it?

Is it the "hidden partition"? How does that make sense -- for one, it is a separate partition and two, it is not included in the drive capacity (90,409MB). Admittedly, I think the hidden partition gets mounted onto one of the system folders ("C:\RRbackups"?) and this might confuse DKlite... ?

Yowwwiie, defrag that; several times if possible.

Also go through the offliine defragmentation when you boot up so you can give the defragger a chance to go through those otherwise locked files (pagefile (frags alot), hibernation file (same there), and the system files which include large chunks of the MFT).

HTH

[astro]

Yowwwiie, defrag that; several times if possible.

Looks a lot worse than it is -- I think it was only about 4% fragmented at the time. The big block of red is "counter-strike-source.gcf".

Also go through the offliine defragmentation when you boot up so you can give the defragger a chance to go through those otherwise locked files (pagefile (frags alot), hibernation file (same there), and the system files which include large chunks of the MFT).

I didn't think that the freebie version of DKLite comes with boot-time defrag? How do I activate it?

[vital-analitix]

Are you sure that you are not looking at the MS system restore? I was baffled too with something like that until I turned it off. (Accessories => System tools => System restore). It basically keeps copies of your pre-install of new software and takes up yonks of space (all waste if you use PQDI / Acronis for backup)

It is meant for those people who have not got a clue about making backups /doing restores. It is like with my kids: they only started to take backups seriously when they lost some of their work a few times.

PS I love "foldersizes" (www.foldersizes.com for version 3.0 or http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page2.html for the last free version 1.3 - which I use). No connection with them, just a very happy user.

Marinus

[kulivontot]

Yeah, by default I think they enable both the thinkvantage rescue and recovery and windows system restore by default. Considering windows reserves like 15% or something ridiculous by default that may be somewhat responsible. If you're really curious, download a tool called sizeexplorer, it will show you graphically where all your space is going. I dunno if it will show it for hidden partitions and things of that nature though.

[christopher_wolf]

Yowwwiie, defrag that; several times if possible.

Looks a lot worse than it is -- I think it was only about 4% fragmented at the time. The big block of red is "counter-strike-source.gcf".

Also go through the offliine defragmentation when you boot up so you can give the defragger a chance to go through those otherwise locked files (pagefile (frags alot), hibernation file (same there), and the system files which include large chunks of the MFT).

I didn't think that the freebie version of DKLite comes with boot-time defrag? How do I activate it?

I know the Steam System well enough to know that it can easily get you over several gigs worth of *.gcf files and content and simply acts huge.

I don't think there is a way to do an offline/boot defrag with DKlite; try this...

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/PageDefrag.html

That should let you take care of the Pagefile and Registry Hive, of which many programs, including anything Steam related, love to fragment during normal operation.

Also, try running contig on individual files instead of a whole HDD defrag pass. See; http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Contig.html

HTH

[jhkaska]

Thanks for the links to “Foldersizes” and “Sizeexplorer”. They both look like they would have helped me a few days ago when I first got into this. I did try to download Foldersizes and the zipped download was somehow corrupted so wouldn’t open. Tried to download twice with the same result. Will try again in a few days and hope that it gets resolved.

In the mean time, I transferred the Rescue and Recovery backup from my Thinkpad drive to another drive and deleted it off of the Thinkpad drive. After I deleted it off, I gained back my missing 40 gig of hard drive space. So Rescue and Recovery was indeed the culprit.

I appreciate all of your input and help. This board is great. I’d be lost without it.

[Scratch]

Buying the full version of Diskeeper is probably one of the best investments you can make for your system. The full version has setpoints to prevent fragging of the paging file and the green striped MFT reserve along with SmartSchedule functions and Boot Time operations. The MFT preservation actually works in your favor from a file system stability standpoint as it prevents Windows from overwriting seemingly unused (reserved) MFT space with files as the partition gets full.

Depending on the way your FS is configured for cluster size the OS can be overly agressive with how much space is reserved for the MFT. On Win 2k you could edit the MFT reserved amount via a registry entry...not sure if that's the case anymore.

[vital-analitix]

..... I did try to download Foldersizes and the zipped download was somehow corrupted so wouldn’t open. Tried to download twice with the same result. Will try again in a few days and hope that it gets resolved.
...

If you keep on having problems then PM me with your email address and I'll email you mine.

On this note: For some reason or another I have had troubles with the build-in XP ZIP version and have resorted back to WinZip 8 (for which I have a license).

Marinus

[jhkaska]

Hey Marinus. I appreciate the offer. However, I finally got the foldersizes program to download. Tried it out and found it very easy to zero in on the un-necessary files that were wasting space on my hard drive. However, it does not allow access to the secret and mysterious RRbackup folder that is taking up a lot of the hard drive. It looks to me like every unnecessary file wastes space twice, once in it's normal location and once in the RRbackup folder. So it really pays to get rid of the junk that is occupying the hard drive.