Vanishing Hard Drive Space

[yiplong]

Something weird has happened to my X60; I think it might be due to a virus.

I only have 20 GB of files on my laptop, (a few hard drive scanning software has confirmed this), but XP is showing that I have used 45 GB. So 25gb of space is taken up by some mysterious non-existing file.

I don't know if there is a way to free the space again. Scan disk didn't help at all.

If not, I will probably reinstall windows XP. The problem is IBM didn't give us a Windows XP CD, we only have the product key in the back.

[ryengineer]

The following will work for Windows XP as well:

why my available HDD under Vista is decreasing.

[andyP]

This is something which has come up quite alot.
It's probably due to rescue and recovery. A standard setting is that it will back up your system every wednesday at 14:00 and uses all the free space. Unfortunately loads of people don't realise this untill their hdds are full.
Go to all programmes - think vantage - rescue and recovery. Here you can see how many back ups have been made and also delete them if you wish to. There is also the possibility to copy them from the hdd and then afterwards delete them.

[yiplong]

Ahah!!!!

It was indeed Rescue and Recovery that was causing all the problem. I spent all night worrying about this hard drive situation, because I have a major presentation to make tomorrow in China. God forbid the country of China should be unable to get financing for its new project because my computer has failed.

[iamdmc]

If this kind of thing happens again, download "Sequoia View"

It will show you the size of folders/files on your hard drive visually...
It's a large square representing your hard drive... then smaller squares within the window that are of different sizes - the larger the square, the more disc space it uses.

Good to hear you solved the problem