Preload drive showing full.....but it should have 80GB free!

[tagleeson]

Hi there,

I recently reset my T61P (Vista Ultimate, MSOffice, Adobe CS3, 4GB RAM) back to factory settings cos it was getting slow, hanging on start, Office was crashing a lot, etc. I reloaded all my software onto the machine and saw that, like before I reset it, that I had 80GB free out of 180GB. However, a week or so later I had a warning that I had run out of disk space.

I deleted a residual R&R backup and got about 20GB back, but shortly thereafter it was back it full.

I've looked at the Properties of all the folders on the C: drive, and the disk space used adds up to about 60GB.

What's going on?

Tom

[GomJabbar]

Try using Windows Search, and search for all files over a certain size. Over 100000 KB might be a good place to start.

[deforest]

search for windirstat, which will analyze your drive and show your file sizes in a handy graphical format, or they have a tree view if you want to investigate from a folder perspective.

[Harryc]

deforest, windirstat is an awesome pgm that I had used in the past and forgotten about. Thanks for dusting it off. This afternoon I discovered it works on Vista as well....nice!

[tagleeson]

Windirstat is good isn't it.

Ok, I've used windirstat, and it tells me that there's 61GB in the Preload disk, as expected.

What's next?

[Marin85]

My guess is that it´s the shadow images/windows system protection that is causing such HD space "leak". Right click on computer -> properties -> advanced settings -> system protection. There you can limit the space system protection is allowed to use. You might want to first turn it completely off to see whether that would recover the missing free space (it may take a few seconds), so you can be sure it´s system protection and not something else. I had similar experience some months ago where I forgot to turn it off ("default" settings on my machines as I don´t really need it), and it sucked amazing amount of GBs in no time But I don´t recommend you to turn it off, it can come very useful if something should go wrong. All you need to do is just taming it.

Hope this helps,

Marin

EDIT: Great tool for freeing HD space is CCleaner. But a warning, don´t use its reg cleaning feature if you don´t exactly know what you are doing

[Andy]

Hi there,

I recently reset my T61P (Vista Ultimate, MSOffice, Adobe CS3, 4GB RAM) back to factory settings cos it was getting slow, hanging on start, Office was crashing a lot, etc. I reloaded all my software onto the machine and saw that, like before I reset it, that I had 80GB free out of 180GB. However, a week or so later I had a warning that I had run out of disk space.

I deleted a residual R&R backup and got about 20GB back, but shortly thereafter it was back it full.

I've looked at the Properties of all the folders on the C: drive, and the disk space used adds up to about 60GB.

What's going on?

Tom

The same thing happened to me. The pre-installed Rescue & Recovery backup system has eaten your drive. The factory preset has R&R run regular backups to your c: drive, a setup that seems just plain insane to me. If you work with very large files -- databases, for example -- you can burn through 80 GB in nothing flat.

Although I did it the hard way from the command line when I got bit like this, you can use R&R's GUI interface to delete all the backups from your C: drive. Here's how:

1. Start R&R
2. Click the button next to "Launch advanced Rescue & Recovery" in the lower left-hand corner
3. From the "Advanced" menu, choose "Delete backups".
4. Select all the backups and click "Delete".
5. Take a really long siesta -- R&R is unbelievably slow at this operation. It may take half a day.

[Rochefort]

Windirstat is good isn't it.

Ok, I've used windirstat, and it tells me that there's 61GB in the Preload disk, as expected.

What's next?

I use SpaceMonger which is lighter

[tagleeson]

Ok, got it sorted now.

It was the VSS that had multiple images on the drive, but that only got it down to 120GB used instead of 60GB. I have turned off the imaging and I backup my computer on an external drive. I'd already deleted the R&R backups, so that wasn't the problem.

While I was scratching my head about where the next 60GB was going to come from, the day after I deleted the VSS images the C: drive suddenly started reading 60GB used, the correct amount...woohoo!

However, I have no idea why it happened. The computer is now running like a fiend, but I have no idea why...great stuff.

Thanks to all for your input.

Tom