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I have a one year old dell with vista basic on it. I have your normal range of programs installed on it (no games- just media players, antivirus, camera software etc). I have a 120gb hard drive, partitioned into a 10gb recovery drive and a 110gb hard drive.

Of the 110gb i assume windows vista uses 9gb as i only have access to 101gb.

When i open my computer and view the properties of my 101Gb hard drive it tells me i am using 71.5gb of it however, when i open up the hard drive and highlight all the folders inside it (including hidden files and folders), it tells me there is only 46gb worth of stuff stored on the hard drive.

There are no files on my desktop so from what i can see i should have 25gb more storage space left on my hard drive and i dont know where its gone! thats like a quarter of my usable hard drive is missing!

Can anyone tell me where my missing 25gb is and if this is normal?

Thanx!!!!

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I hope you are well today?

We have a great Tech Team who will help you with your issue,they are a little busy however a little patience and they should deal with your thread soon.


Thankyou.

JB.

Also posted here:http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Hard-...-t211791.html# and is reciving help.

Hello, IamTheConfused, welcome to PCHF.

Your afraid of running out of space with 71gb free?

Please include "protected operating system files" in your search, and you'll see more in your search there.

Also, in addition to what Murray said on the other forum, when you buy a 120gb disk, partition and format the drive, already a chunk of that data will be taken up by disk information, so you won't be able to utilise the full 110gb + 10gb of data on that disk. If you check the total sizes of both disks, you'll see what I mean.

Hi, thanks heaps for your reply and advice!! Unfortunately it was the other way around and 71gb of my hard drive was being used so i only had 30gb free! (the original size of the hard drive petition available to me was 101gb when i brought the comp)

I tried searching for spyware and virus's but found none, then i tried defraggin and running a system clean up and after i restarted my comp following those two things i had gained an extra 10gb free space!

I then included protected system files in my search and saw they accounted for another 4gb.

If you remember from my first post i was trying to track down 25gb of missing space, and now i have accounted for 14 of them!!

I still have no clue where the other 10gb could be coz i think ive covered most things now but there is still 10% missing of the 101gb that i started with last year!

Thanks again for your advice

Will remember you said you took up 10gb for the recovery partition which takes it down to 91gb?

When you select all the files in explorer, does it now match up with what it shows in your disk properties?

no it still doesnt match up unfortunately!

my hard drive is a 120gb before partitioning. After partitioning it shows a 101gb hard drive and a 9.9gb hard drive

Even including all hidden files and protected operating system files and progs etc there is only 50 of the 101gb accounted for however, my drive tells me that 60gb is being used

The other smaller partition of my hard drive is completely seperate to this larger 101gb partition

It will never match it perfectly, because you cannot see the system volume information, but if it really is being mis-reported, then there is only one solution and that is to run a disk check, go to My Computer, right click on your local disk, and go to Properties, Tools tab, and under "Error Checking", click Check Now. Tick both check boxes and click on Start. Reboot your PC and let the scan take place. Any missing space can be retrieved here.

It won't be anything else, such as virus or malware. I believe the space here is actually being used as suggested in your drive properties. Did you also try deleting your previous restore points as suggested by Murrey? This will match things up even more.