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Drive Problems

649 views 4 replies 2 participants last post by  woodsss 
#1 ·
Not sure exactly what occurred or how it happened, however... If anyone is able to help I would greatly appreciate it. Since I do not know much about computers I can find and send any more information which might be needed to solve this problem.

I have two drives, an SSD and HDD. My HDD is 1TB and had roughly 900GB of installed items on it (primarily Steam games). Out of the blue I went to play a game on steam and noticed my entire library appeared to be uninstalled. Assuming my drive wiped all my downloads, I checked through storage settings only to find my games all appeared to be installed and present within my drive--but not displaying on steam as installed. I also noticed some of the games I had previously uninstalled such as Battlefield 2042 which was 100+GB's of storage space was still appearing within the installed games on my drive, however the uninstall and modify feature was grayed out.
Even though I uninstalled the games weeks ago it appears they are still taking up space on my drive. After running optimization and diagnostic tests on my drive in hopes it would fix something for me, I must have done something to mess it up even more, because now when I view my storage settings and check the HDD it shows I no longer have 900GB of installed apps and features, but now it is 676GB of documents and only 165GB of apps and features (Refer to attached file). When I click the tab shown in the picture labeled as "D:\ (Files at drive root)" it takes me to what I assume are all of the files located on my HDD. I have looked through all of those files including steamapp files and cannot find any trace of the games I have uninstalled or any programs taking up extra space. Since I cannot find any trace of these games, yet they are still taking up space on my drive I have no idea how to clear up this space.

I apologize for the horrible explanation I am not very good with computers, so hopefully this might clear any confusion up...

-Steam showed all games being uninstalled, however my drive showed them all still installed.
-I then found multiple games which I had previously uninstalled, still appearing within my drive and taking up space.
-I tried optimizing, repairing, diagnosing, and other windows tools, with no success.
-After all of this, the hundreds of GB's being taken by what I assumed to be uninstalled games, are now showing to be 600+ GB of documents, when in reality I should only have 100GB or less in my documents.
 

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#2 ·
Did you make your documents folder the root of the D drive? That is what it looks like.
Storage settings page is just gonna blindly add up everything underneath the documents folder (D:\), thus you see 676 GB = everything on D.

Do you still have a Steam folder on D?
Start Steam, go to Steam menu -> Settings -> Downloads -> STEAM Library Folders
Is this D drive Steam folder listed there?

If not, add it back by clicking the + to the right of the locations that are listed there. Whatever games are installed under this Steam folder should get set back to installed on your Steam Library when you do this.

If it is already there, you could try removing it and adding it back, that might get the games to show as installed. If not, maybe post some File Explorer screenshots. The games installed should be under D:\...\steam\steamapps\common.

There is a free tool called Treesize Free that shows where your files are located and how much space they are taking up. It may help here, more so than Storage Settings, at least.

It's possible that Battlefield 2042 is just a spurious entry in the installed programs list. For whatever reason. the entry did not get cleared when the game was uninstalled. If this is the case and you want to clear it, you can with this method:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/tutorials/manually-remove-programs-from-add-remove-programs/
 
#3 ·
Thank you for the response! I checked my steam and my d drive folder was still there, I removed it and readded, but didn't have any success. I also checked and still have my steamapps folder within my d drive, but could not find any game files in the D:\...\steam\steamapps\common section. I bet I accidently made my documents folder the root of the d drive, but after further examination it appears my entire D drive was copied onto my documents folder--however I still cannot find the games which appear to be taking space either on the copied document section or within my actual d drive. Is there a simple way to change the root of my d drive back to what it should be? I am hoping maybe I accidently copied my d drive to documents, and made the documents folder the root drive--possibly causing all of the issues?

--edit-- I can also send screenshots of my file explorer or drives if need be.
 
#4 ·
Sorry, I am unsure as to what you have done, and it is difficult to extricate you from it from afar. If you want to post screenshots of File Explorer or Treesize Free, please do so.
Need to see D drive, and what is under Users folder on C.
Documents folder by default is at C:\Users\[Your Username}\Documents
 
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