Thinkpads Forum

I ordered a T61 with Vista Ultimate preinstalled on a 100gb hard drive. When it came I saw in My Compter/Control Panel/Partition Manager that there was indeed a 93.1 GB hard drive with a 6.3 GB hidden partition for system recovery and a visible 87.8 GB for the OS. I also saw that there was about a GB of software preinstalled with the OS. However, of the 87.6 only about 55 GB are available. The OS cant take up 30 GB!?!. Im wondering whats using this enormous amount of space. thanx

that's pretty scary. 30GB of stuff, i'd check each folder's properties and see what's using up that much. We know the Windows folder will be about 8-9GB but maybe the "Users" folder and others are taking up a good amount so check that out.

Paging file, hibernation storage, update uninstalls, system restore points, etc, can take up a lot of space.

I have a 160 GB hard drive and I am also running Vista Ultimate. After I installed all my programs, which isn't all that much, mainly Office 2003 and Adobe CS3 Suite, I am down to about 105 GB.

System Restore takes up some space.

Sleep/hibernation takes up some space.

Rescue and Recovery backup takes up some space.

Well unless he has 4GB of RAM and all that a 4GB Pagefile but system restore shouldn't be taking up that much space yet, however i'm not sure if it locks it off or not. With a big drive normally it's set for like 10% of the drive so that's like 16GB. I'm not sure tho if it just will use that much or if it's already locked by the OS for future usage.

You can go into Computer Properties and click System Protection and then drag the slider down a bit to something smaller like 4GB or so or turn off system restore completely (that's what i did )

I had something like this when I installed Vista Business 32 on a clean hard drive through the Vista Express Upgrade program. Then after running R&R4 , 9 gb of consumed disk space became freed up. Here's a thread about this in the Vista forum.


http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... disk+space

Is your notebook setup to automatically backup your harddrive? Check to see if you have any backups on the drive. Click thinkvantage, go down to thinkvantage technologies, then into Rescure and Recovery. Then select view all backups. You might already have a few backups on your C:\ drive without you even knowing it.

Also, if you have systems restore on, try disabling it to see if you recover any extra space. You can always reenable it after.

Hibernation does take up quite a bit of space when enabled, a little over 4GB's, but it does not account for 30GB's of missing HDD space. My money would have to be on the backups.

I'm really curious about the answer to this.

I've been installing Vista Ultimate 32 on a T61p with a brand new blank aftermarket 7K200 Travelstar Drive. I started with the three Lenovo Recovery DVDs and got the OS and Lenovo software mostly installed. I used System Update 3 to update about 15 files. I manually installed the enhanced bluetooth drivers and wireless bluetooth drivers. The ONLY application software I've installed so far is Foxit, my preferred .pdf reader. Then I defragged using the Diskeeper Home Edition which Lenovo pre-installs.

I have NOT done Windows updates. I have not yet installed Microsoft Office Business 2007 (which I bought from Lenovo and came on disks with my T61p).

Finally, I have no "unknown devices" in Device Manager. I have not launched Rescue and Recovery yet.

After that minimal installation, of the 181 gb on my C: partition, I had only 139 GB free. I had 42 GB consumed.

I cleaned up my hard drive with Disk Cleanup. I deleted temp files with IE7. No improvement. I changed my paging file to none. No improvement, even with a reboot. Then I turned off system restore and soon after my free space went from 139 GB to 164 gb.

How in the world could system restore take 25 gb with one reset point? I don't think that was it. Something Vista did consumed 25 gb and then freed it.

By the way, when I had only 139 gb free, my defragmentation showed a large group of fragmented and undefragmentable files. I was off searching for a better defrag program than Diskeeper Home, something with boot defrag.

Could it have been indexing temporary files? Could it have been system restore? It wasn't R&R.

Someone smart on this board must know how Vista grabs a bunch of gigabytes, 9 to 25 gigabytes in my experience, and then later frees them.

The 25 gb reappeared mysteriously while I was preparing this post. Here's what I could find about hard disk space consumption from Windows Explorer:

Windows directory 9.04 gb on disk 44,461 files 7,691 folders
Download directoyr 80 mb 5 files, 2 folders
Icons directory 4kb
Program Files directory 2.21 gb 14,255 files
SWTOOLS directory 1.6 gb 4,111 files
Drivers directory 109 MB 267 files
Intel directory 613 KB 3 files, 1 folders
SWSHARE directory 5.24 MB
Users directory 491 MB 1,163 files

Files in root directory.
Setup 86bytes
TVTPKFILTER.DAT 1.69 KB
BOOTSECT.BAK 8 KB
SYSLEVEL.LGL 53 BYTES
WIRELESSDIAGLOG.CSV 2.34 KB

Total Space Used. 12 gb by adding up above files and folders

17.5 gb used after Vista cleaned itself up.
164 gb free
139 gb free. 42 gb used before Vista cleaned itself up.25 gb difference

My system is a T61p with 4 GB of ram (of which Vista sees only 3 gb), an aftermarket Hitachi Travelstar 7K200 drive, Intel TurboRAM, an 8 GB Express Card (assigned for now to ReadyBoost).


Curious Barry in Wyoming

barrywohl wrote:How in the world could system restore take 25 gb with one reset point?

Are you really sure there was only one restore point? System Restore often makes restore points automatically when you install or update software or drivers. I have seen several restore points created automatically in one day when I was busy doing updates and such (in XP).

Here:

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Excellent help, ryengineer. More gold that I will use regularly. As you usual, you really know how to bail a novice like me out of trouble.

However, I am still mystified about how Vista consumed then released 25 GB of files (of un-defragmentable files, by the way) just while I was writing a post.

I don't think it had anything to do with my deleting my single system restore point in my two day old system. My hibernation file might be three (or four?) GB, plus a bit of overhead. I had already deleted the straightforward temp files. I have never booted R&R4. I don't think it backs up without at least a first boot.

Anyway, after I finish using Acronis True Image Home 10 to make a DVD stored image, and then a USB HD stored image, I'll try out your recommendations.

What about Vista Search Indexing? Could that be the space hog until it finishes its first index?

Thanks again.
Barry