[ChemNerd]

So I have a Lenovo Thinkpad X61t, it's roughly two months old. Comes with a 160GB HDD (148GB actual) with about 8GB taken for the restore/repair partition leaving 140GB free for the standard system partition.

When I look at the drive (either on the computer or on the drive properties) it says I have roughly 24GB of free space remaining. The problem is I can't account for 116GB worth of stuff, only about 65GB (based on the files in my documents, program files, windows, etc).

I'm making sure I show all system and all hidden files and I'm still only coming up with about 65GB. So I'm really not sure where the other 50GB is.

What I've done so far:
- Ran a full virus scan with AVG = nothing was found
- Ran Check Disk = no errors reported
- Defrag Analysis = only a 4% fragmentation
- Spybot and AdAware = nothing detected beyond the standard cookie nonsense
- Deleted old system restore points = freed up 20GB of mystery space (it used to be 70GB missing).
- Did the clean file to remove history, temp files, error dumps, hibernation files, etc off the drive = got about 5GB from that.

Given than I freed up 20GB by deleting system restore points, I'm not sure if there might be other things I'm missing that are holding the other 50 hostage. I read in post on a different forum where someone had lost 8GB to Norton AV's recycler. I don't have Norton AV installed mind you but who knows what Vista or the Lenovo ThinkPad software (there's sooooo much of it) might be doing. Maybe I've been hijacked (I've noticed the HDD seems more active now than when I first got it a couple months ago) but I don't recall doing anything that should result in that.

I know that I could just backup my files and do a system restore but I'd rather not unless it's a last case kind of thing. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated. Thank you.

[Elvandil]

Be sure hidden files are unhidden. See if one of these helps locate the space:

Disk Pie or TreeSize

[polly1]

There is a clever little program out ther on google called 'were'd my space go'
its totally free and helped me once.
Give it a try.

good luck

[ChemNerd]

Originally Posted by Elvandil

Be sure hidden files are unhidden. See if one of these helps locate the space:

Disk Pie or TreeSize

I have tried both programs as well as the one suggested by polly1, thank you both. The result is still, sadly, the same.

I've confirmed that both hidden and system files are being shown but it's still not even close to matching up. TreeSize Free is saying that I have a total of 66,051 MB worth of files but then says that the free space is 23,465 MB (of 143,804MB). Some simple math shows that the used space (~65GB) + free space (~22GB) only equals 89,516MB (~87GB). There's 54,288 MB missing. This is only serving as more confirmation that somewhere, there's 50GB of my HD being held up by something.

Any other ideas? Thanks!

[ChemNerd]

Ah ha! I found the problem. One of the directories that wouldn't allow me to look at it (RRBackup) was the key. I searched around Google for a bit and found that one of Lenovo's bundled software programs was at fault. Rescue and Recovery created a 50GB backup file. The file is only accesible through the program.

I deleted the backup and voila! I have my 50GB back. Thanks everyone for looking, hopefully this will serve to help anyone in the future.

[Elvandil]

Thank you for the information.

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