Reduced hard drive

[longdoggg]

Hi,

 

I have a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop which is about 4 years old. The OS is XP, with 1GB of RAM and a 60GB hard drive. This machine is used mostly by my daughter.

 

The other day she said that the hard drive was full, which I thought was strange and when i looked at the properties of the drive, it told me it was a 34GB with approx 33GB used!!!

 

I then went to the disk manager and checked there if there was any mysterious large partions that had been created; there wasn't!

 

I'm baffled by this. Do any of you guys recognise the issue or had a similar experience.

 

Can anyone suggest where the missing 20 ish GBs are :confused:

[Tootech]

Run a disk cleanup to try and get enough space back to run your system.

 

Go to Disk Management through the Admin Tools in the Control Panel, post a screen shot of the disk management console please.

[Goku]

Hello Long. Try using EASEUS Parition Manager and see if it shows the missing disk space.

 

Also, how many disks does it show in "My Computer". If more than one, what sizes are they?

 

Please post the required information as soon as possible. Good Luck.

 

-- Goku

[Tootech]

Try using EASEUS Parition Manager

 

Wouldn't Disk Manager show the full picture of the disk without taking up more space?

[RandyL]

That is a good point. It really does sound like that all available hard drive space has been used.

 

longdoggg has your dughter by any chance attempted to reinstall Windows?

[Goku]

Wouldn't Disk Manager show the full picture of the disk without taking up more space?

I just thought it might be another one of those Windows screw ups. Though you have a point too. :)

 

But EASEUS is low on disk space (less than 75 MBs) and I think it is possible to free up that much amount by clearing up the temporary files and emptying the 'Recycle Bin'. Though it would be best to wait till Long comes and answers our questions.

 

Cheers.

 

-- Goku

[longdoggg]

Hi Guys,

 

Thanks for your feedback. I've had a busy weekend away from computers, so will upload a screen grab of the disk management page tonight. I'll also have a harder look at what's on the disk and clean it up as much as possible.

My daughter has not done anything with Windows. She uses the pc mostly for networking etc and to play the SIMMS games.

 

Cheers.

[longdoggg]

OK guys, this is the screen grab of the disk management page. I hope someone can suggest what's wrong and where are my missing GBs.

[Plastic Nev]

Hi, are you sure the hard drive is supposed to be a 60GB drive as what is showing there is a drive of total 38GB, which would indicate an original drive of say 40GB, though the partitions of FAT and FAT32 are a puzzle as to why they are there. With the operating system being XP all of the drive should ideally be NTFS.

 

as far as sorting those odd partitions out I will leave it to Tootech and Goku, but do check that it is supposed to be a 60GB drive please.

[Tootech]

Its a 40GB drive - take the 37.25 disk manager reports multiply by 1024 three times and you have the full 40GB.

 

The FAT and FAT32 partitions are boot and recovery partitions respectively.

 

Being nearly full I'd check the user accounts My Documents folders - most likely place to find big files and either back them up on flash drive/external hard drive or delete them.