disk-spacewindows 7
I just installed Win 7, but did not format the drive. Windows shows that 122 GB of drive space has been consumed. Clearly this seems strange, so I selected everythign under the C: drive (including hidden) and only 18GBs is shown. Is there anyway to find out where the extra 100 GB went, and how to recover that space?
I deleted the Windows.old directory and ran disk cleanp already.
Thanks!
Basic disk overhead - file tables, NTFS information etc.
When you open Explorer and select properties, Windows reads the free space from the NTFS bitmap metafile. Selecting all files/folders in explorer and showing properties, scan all files/folders. But Windows skips here hidden files/folders and folders where your current user doesn't have read permissions (System Volume Information folder for example).
You should use TreeSizeFree (run it as admin) to see which folders take most space:
Best Answer
Many times, its in the windows side by side assemblies. My c:\windows folder is showing 18GB used, when its really about half that. (Just got a new computer, old one showed over 30GB) If that is where the space is used, it is not actually using that much, it is the way that windows counts the hard links that the files use.
Hard links are used to point to the same file many different times, instead of actually hosting the file: IE, have one copy of a DLL, and then 5 other spots where it points to the same DLL. (but just points to it). That way, they can easily point to different versions of DLL's without the wasted space of storing them all. The way windows counts disk space used, it would count all 6 instances of the DLL. I have seen where the windows folder takes up over 80% of the drive space when you look at it, yet only 50% of the drive is used.