Help : Missing 40 GB Size in Z61m

Dear all,

my system (9451A21) is equipped with 100GB SATA 5400 rpm hard drive. It is red 88,1 GB in windows plus additional 5 GB partition for ThinkVantage BIOS prorams.

I use this baby quite extensively and never had any problems with it. Recently i check my hard drive and to my surprise i only have 2,75 GB left.

I get suspicious cause i really care about the size of the files and programs i put in this notebook. In my rough calculation i should be only use about 30 GB.

I tried manually to gather the size of some files and folders more than 100mb in the windows explorer (C root). Here you go (measurement in GB, rounded) :

Hibernation file 1,5
Page File 0,7
Windows Folder 3,2
Program Files Folder 8,3
MSOCache Folder 0,4
IBMTOOLS Folder 1,65
I386 Folder 0,5
DRIVERS Folder 0,3
Document Folder 29,4

Those details give me 45,95 GB of files being used. Since i only put all of my files in My Documents folder then i think it is safe to assume that the total usage will never going to exceed 50 GB, combined with other files altogether. But in the windows explorer it is shown that i only have 2,75 GB left (85 GB used) in C!

I did defragment the harddrive and do the chkdsk thing. But everything seems normal.

Anyone have any ideas what is really happened? Where is the rest of 40 GB go?
Is it the act of a virus? I have Norton Antivirus with the most recent update. Should I reinstall Windows? It came preloaded with WinXP Pro.

Thanks in advance....

 

Did you do any local backups (e.g. using Rescue and Recovery)? That would take a lot of space and you wouldn't be able to tell unless you cleared the "Hide protected system files" option; then you would see a hidden folder in the root of C:.

 

have you had your backups saved on your HDD and not on an external HDD or DVDs?

 

Oh geez, i think i DID backup with my R&R some time in the past. Just want to try, no particular reason at the time. But as long as i remember i use 6 DVDs as the media.
There are, as long as i can remember, some hang up during the backup process. Could this be the reason? I think R&R should put some files in C first and then wrote it on the external media.

How can i delete the backup files? Is there any tools that i can use to locate whether such files exist? Why the backup does not shown on Windows Explorer?

Thank you for your help.

 

Dear 1pennyshort and paqtrick22 :

thanks for your answer. I checked the R&R settings and yes indeed the backup was stored in C.

I delete the backup files and gain my 40GB back!

Thank you guys. This forums rocks!

 

of course this is why i love this site/forum

that was what i almost did a few months ago

 

I had a similar problem except the large lost memory was being kept in my i386 folder. I was told that thinkvantage rescue and recovery could help me manage the backups stored there. it turned out that the portion of thinkvantage (commands, program etc) that allows you to do that was missing from my computer for some strange reason. so i was told that if i deleted thinkvanatage it would delete all the backups. so i did. but i still have my i386 folder taking up 29GB of my 40 GB hardrive. Does anyone know how to identify the backup files so I can manually delete them without deleting the original operating system files?

thanks

 

I have a similar problem; I think my backup was burned onto the C Drive. However, I have a quick question - somewhat amateur. I am having trouble locating the backup file so I can delete it; can someone help me find it?