Storage HDD space has vanished

This is really baffling me, yesterday I had more than 100gb spare on my H: drive, now i dont.



windirstat is still showing that i should, but the disk properties isnt, as far as i can see on the disk, there isnt stuff on there, and I certainly haven't added 100gig of stuff.

Any ideas?

 

Failing hard drive maybe? I had one once that was slowly failing and gave stupid readings like that.

 

You got system restore switched on for the drive?

 

nah system restore isnt on for the drive. The drive is only about 2 or 3 months old, its not old at all.

 

There's lots of data in the 'user' folder, someone else used it and downloaded a shed load?

 

Run SeaTools to check it isn't failing, even if it is brand new doesn't mean it can't fail. Other than that, possibly something wrong with the SATA port? Very unlikely but not a lot else I can think of.

 

Nah, im the only user of this pc, you're right there is alot there, but its about 130gb music, bt still if you add up all those numbers, is no where near close to what properties says it is.

 

so far has passed all the tests, just running the long test. Any idea why that drive is orange? Its the one with the "missing" space, all the others are grey.

 

Different make of hard drive, Maxtor and Seagate apparently use gold ones, whereas everything else is grey.

 

possibly a virus duplicating data, I have had this on my last machine at one point, I ran down the directories until I found the files causing the problem, then deleted them, first time it crashed my system, second attempt worked but it took ages and I had to leave the pc while it did it, then after a few days there was no space again.

Did a system wipe and reinstalled the operating system and this fixed the problem.

 

Try running windirstat as administrator.

 

For example i managed this with FRAPS. I enabled desktop monitoring and then hit the recording key - so i ended up with my SSD full of desktop videos .

 

Have you been playing around with symlinks?
Windows doesn't behave well when it comes to calculating disk space on drives where symbolic links are in use, as it tends to subtract the storage space of both the actual file and the file pointed to by the symbolic link (ie; the same file) when calculating disk usage.

This may have been fixed since I last checked, but I remember that being an issue sometime in the past where, for example, someone made a symbolic link to a 300Gb Steam folder and saw their free disk space plummet by 300Gb as reported by the OS, but without actually losing the space.

Have you Chkdsk'd the drive?

Also this.

 

Are shadow copies enabled on that drive?
Could well be previous versions that's using that amount of space

 

Google a app. By the name of "sequoia tree", it will create a visual map of everything on your selected drive, organised by size.

Good luck.

Sent from Bittech Android app

 

TreeSize also shows you what files and folders are the largest on your hard drive, hopefully showing you where this space is being lost.

 

I opted to move everything onto another hdd and format this one, problem solved. I cannot still work out what had happened. I tried using various space diag programs, that would show all the folder/file sizes, yet none of them would equal the size properties said was on the disk. Bizarre, well its all happy days again now. Thanks all for input