Drive distopia

November 3, 2007 9:27 AM

Vista disk space filter: What's eating 190 GB on my computer?

So, my C drive is 229 GB. Windows Vista tells me I have 5-ish GB free (screengrab). When I run a program to see how I'm using the disk space (WinDirStat), it appears as though I'm only using 33 GB (screengrab). Any ideas what is going on here?

posted by gavia to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

Try running scandisk. Right click on your hard drive, Properties/Tools/Scandisk.
posted by zixyer at 9:31 AM on November 3, 2007

Free space count is probably wrong.

chkdsk /f c:
and reboot.
posted by majick at 9:32 AM on November 3, 2007

Best answer: The 'shadow copy' 'feature' might be eating it all.
posted by holgate at 9:38 AM on November 3, 2007

Response by poster: Chkdsk / scandisk doesn't solve it.
posted by gavia at 10:07 AM on November 3, 2007

I depend on the Sequoia View program to see what's eating space on my drives. I use Win2K so I'm not sure if this works under Vista or not, but it might be worth trying.
posted by rolypolyman at 10:13 AM on November 3, 2007

WinDitStat is an open source program that does what Sequoia View does.
posted by gmarceau at 10:17 AM on November 3, 2007

Best answer: Shadow copy it was (using 191 GB of space). This page explained how to find out how big it is and how to limit its space.
posted by gavia at 10:24 AM on November 3, 2007

Volume Shadow Copy has been around since XP and Server 2003. It's analogous function is Time Machine in OSX. I don't know what happened to gavia but it's unexpected behaviour, not by design. In Vista, shadow copy is controlled in System Properties under the System Protection tab. Individual files are controlled by the Previous Versions tab on any file property sheet.
posted by tracert at 3:28 PM on November 3, 2007