The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Crazy hard drive or ignorant user?

    Discussion in 'Lenovo' started by mikeponm, May 25, 2007.

  1. mikeponm

    mikeponm Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    32
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    I just finished doing a clean install of vista business. My hard drive is 60Gb and was getting too full (only about 10Gb left). I backed up my files onto a external drive before doing the install. To my amazment, when I checked my hard drive space after installing it indicates that I only have about 6Gb left ! I feel like I'm missing something that is very simple yet very significant.

    Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
     
    mikeponm, May 25, 2007
    #1
  2. vkpascal

    vkpascal Notebook Guru

    Reputations:
    2
    Messages:
    58
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Do you know how many partitions there are? Did you create a new partition over the others????...
    I haven't gotten my hands on vista yet but you should try Disk Management (if it's still called that on Vista)
     
    vkpascal, May 25, 2007
    #2
  3. John Ratsey

    John Ratsey Moderately inquisitive Super Moderator

    Reputations:
    7,197
    Messages:
    28,841
    Likes Received:
    2,170
    Trophy Points:
    581
    The Vista update doesn't destroy all your old stuff but puts them into a couple of folders. I've deleted mine but one is something like "OldWindows" and the other is the old Documents and Settings. And other folders on the HDD are left as they were. This is a refreshing change from the wipe everything approach.

    So perhaps what you think is a clean install isn't so clean: The only clean parts are new Windows, Program Files and Users folders.

    John
     
    John Ratsey, May 25, 2007
    #3
  4. mikeponm

    mikeponm Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    32
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    The system saving my old documents/data would make sense because it seems like I have less hard drive space than before the "clean install" because my data is just hidden somewhere while I have put another 5Gb operating system on top of it all. The problem is that I don't want or need this data. I really have no idea where to find it.

    I wonder if it would be easier to have linux so that I could just open up my drives and delete without having to search for things. I tried searching for a disk management tool but didn't find one yet. If anyone has advice on how to find these folders from previous installs I would be grateful.

    Thanks for your replies so far. much appreciated.
     
    mikeponm, May 25, 2007
    #4
  5. mikeponm

    mikeponm Notebook Enthusiast

    Reputations:
    3
    Messages:
    32
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    15
    Ok. John, I opened up the my computer icon and did a search of the C drive using the word "old". There are a few very big folders popping up and I'll start deleting them. Vista search is coming in handy.

    the windows.old folder contained 31Gb alone and I now have that as free space.

    Thanks for your help
     
    mikeponm, May 25, 2007
    #5