Thursday, August 24, 2017

Missing disk space in Windows XP

On my mother's Lenovo laptop, Windows XP claims that the hard drive is almost full. According to the properties window, 52.7 out of 55.2 GB is in use:


Drive C properties


By deleting temp files from Internet Explorer, System Restore, Recycle bin, Windows Update, System Cleanup, I managed to free up about one GB. That's still > 50 GB in use, which still is a lot more than I expected. Hence, I gave good old WinDirStat a spin, and here's the output:


WinDirStat


It might be hard to read here, but the first line says that the total amount of disk space in use on drive C is 24.3 GB. So Windows claims usage of 52.7 GB and WinDirStat can only account for 24.3 GB. Where is the other half of that disk space being used?


I hope someone has an answer, or some tricks or tips to do further research.




UPDATE: The laptop in question has an SSD hard drive. I am aware that these disk (at least the earlier ones) have a limited life-time. Could the symptoms described be caused by wear and tear on the SSD?

No comments:

Post a Comment

hard drive - Leaving bad sectors in unformatted partition?

Laptop was acting really weird, and copy and seek times were really slow, so I decided to scan the hard drive surface. I have a couple hundr...