T410-Where'd my disk go?

[JonathanGennick]

I just spent most of yesterday reinstalling my T410 from scratch. I applied the restore CD from Lenovo. Then I installed my major applications: Office 2010, Expression Web, OpenOffice. I also installed a few minor items such as Google Chrome and Skype. Finally, I put on 12GB of document and photo files. At the end of the afternoon, my hard drive shows only 42GB free out of 108GB total.

That's 66GB used! That's an incredible amount of overhead.

It gets worse. I've gone to the Properties dialog for every folder on my C drive. When I manually total up the disk space used by those folders, I get only 33.98GB. That's half the 66GB that the drive shows as used. Where's that other 33GB of space?

I made sure to show hidden files when I counted space used, to ensure not missing any folders.

I've gone through the Disk Cleanup thing. No joy there. All that I can clean, I've cleaned.

I've already deleted the recovery partition, which I do not need.

I did run a Windows Backup onto a portable hard-drive. I seem to recall having much more space free before running that backup. I'm not positive though. Would Windows Backup consume space on my primary drive without telling me?

I'm running an SSD drive. Does that come into play? Is there some issue w/block size on that drive? It's a 128GB PNY drive.

I'm just flabbergasted at having only 42GB free after installing Windows. The math doesn't seem to work out, and I'd like to find out where all the used space has gone to.

[emtee3511]

Open Computer and click properties -- check the Previous Versions Tab -- anything there?

[JonathanGennick]

Open Computer and click properties -- check the Previous Versions Tab -- anything there?

Yes. There are several entries. There's no indication as to how much disk space each is consuming.

How can I delete them?

[JonathanGennick]

Ok. I sorted out how to delete the restore points. Now I show 46.8GB free out of 118GB. That still represents a depressing amount of overhead.

118 - 46.8 = 71.2GB

71.2GB - 12GB (my data) = 59.2GB for Windows and my applications

Maybe that's about right. 60GB for Windows and apps seems a lot, but maybe that's just the way things are.

[comps]

Try cleaning up temporary windows storage directories (C:\WINDOWS\Temp and C:\Documents and Settings\Local Settings\YourUsername\Temp .. or their equivalents on Vista/7). The space might be taken by a hibernation file (which, on windows, has size of a total installed memory) - something like C:\hiberfile.sys .

[JonathanGennick]

@comps, thanks. I've decided to rebuild the machine a second time. I'll keep a better watch on disk space this time around.

[Colonel O'Neill]

Most likely, it'll be the C:\RRbackups folder.

You have to take ownership of it to enumerate it's filesize.

[JonathanGennick]

Most likely, it'll be the C:\RRbackups folder.

I didn't have that folder. I didn't use Thinkpad's R&R utility.

Too late now anyway. I've wiped the drive and begun again.

[Colonel O'Neill]

I think the default preload settings creates RRbackups according to some schedule.

[JonathanGennick]

Redid everything. Came out with 68GB free this time. That's better than 42GB, for sure.

All I can think of is that I must've flubbed something when I ran a Windows Backup the last time and done something to burn up space on my local drive. I'll probably never know for sure.

[emtee3511]

Glad it worked out -- 68gb is much better than 42 for sure -- and now you know your 410 even better than you did before -- bet your brain needs a little 'veg' time