Help with maxed out hard drive

[dkryan]

Originally Posted By: Popinski
NOTE:

NORTON ANTIVIRUS IS A WASTE OF SPACE AND SLOWS YOUR COMPUTER DOWN REALLY BAD!!!!


I probably would have agreed with you in 2008 or 2009. But NIS is much less bloated than it used to be and in my opinion, does a better job of catching the [censored] that needs to be caught.

Unfortunately, the much heralded ESET allowed a nasty worm onto that same laptop in the summer of 2010. Solid advice from knowledgeable people on this forum quickly resolved the problem.

I sent the details to ESET; they responded with "[censored] happens and we can't catch everything." I switched to NIS the next day.

 

[dkryan]

Originally Posted By: urchin
First of all I wonder if you have a lot of bad sectors on that disk and the HDD is reading those as occupied space?

You should test the HDD it might be failing.

Another thing try running chkdsk /r and if you see no improvement try running sfc/scannow.


Am I running checkdisk (chkdsk) at the C prompt? sfc/scannow (surface scan?) at that same prompt?

 

[Rand]

Is is possible your system restore has 40gb of backups or something?

try turning off system restore?

 

[dkryan]

Originally Posted By: Rand
Is is possible your system restore has 40gb of backups or something?

try turning off system restore?


I checked and the setting for system restore was using 12% of my HD capacity (about 14GB). I dropped that to 3%. Also, I deleted all previous restore points.

I'll run check disk off of the control panel command once I sign off of the forum.

 

[Colt45ws]

When this happens, I start checking the properties of all the folders. First at root (C level; pick the biggest one and work my way down from there. Eventually, youll find it. May have to enable hidden folders and files, but the reason for the spacewastage is there, somewhere.

 

[PandaBear]

use a SMART tool like Passmark Diskcheckup. What you want to see is how many reallocated sectors or event there are. In a perfect drive it should be 0 in both, and in a slightly non perfect drive it should be near 0. If high number in both, the drive is dying and you should probably replace it. And when all the reserved space for reallocation is used up, your drive will reduce in size / space.

This is more useful than using chkdsk nowadays.

 

[Colt45ws]

Ive never seen a drive with high realloc be usable. Even though it allocates a fresh sector, the data does not carry over. The OS quickly fails.

 

[OVERKILL]

Originally Posted By: dkryan
Originally Posted By: Popinski
NOTE:

NORTON ANTIVIRUS IS A WASTE OF SPACE AND SLOWS YOUR COMPUTER DOWN REALLY BAD!!!!


I probably would have agreed with you in 2008 or 2009. But NIS is much less bloated than it used to be and in my opinion, does a better job of catching the [censored] that needs to be caught.

Unfortunately, the much heralded ESET allowed a nasty worm onto that same laptop in the summer of 2010. Solid advice from knowledgeable people on this forum quickly resolved the problem.

I sent the details to ESET; they responded with "[censored] happens and we can't catch everything." I switched to NIS the next day.


They are right however.

ESET found 50 (yes, FIFTY) infections on a laptop I recently worked on that had NIS 2011 installed on it. NIS had no knowledge of the infections.

I left NIS on there. They had a valid subscription and it is a good product. All of the top-tier ones are. And none of them have a perfect detection rating.

 

[urchin]

Originally Posted By: dkryan
Originally Posted By: urchin
First of all I wonder if you have a lot of bad sectors on that disk and the HDD is reading those as occupied space?

You should test the HDD it might be failing.

Another thing try running chkdsk /r and if you see no improvement try running sfc/scannow.


Am I running checkdisk (chkdsk) at the C prompt? sfc/scannow (surface scan?) at that same prompt?


Yes.

Try chkdsk /r first if no improvement......then try sfc/scannow.

You still need to check the integrity of your HDD it may have a lot of bad sectors which the OS think are occupied.

A great FREE security suite that has gotten excellent reviews from AV-TEST.org is AVG.

 

[dkryan]

Thanks again for all the advice!

However, I'm REAL tired of trying to resolve this issue. No offense to my mother-in-law (she acutally LIKES me), but I have a new ASUS N53SN-71RH sitting next to the Toshiba awaiting my attention.

I managed to free up a total of 11GB of HD space on the Toshiba, so it's sitting at 17 GB of free space.

So now I can either nuke the C drive and use the Toshiba recovery disk or I can simply go and purchase a new hard drive.

If I go the new HD route, can I simply load the O/S via the recovery disk?

Feel free to practice before the November elections. Your vote is welcome.

 

[Colt45ws]

If you have everyyhing off of it, you can simply run the recovery. Be aware it will probably take a good day to bring windows back up to date once installed.

 

[OVERKILL]

Yes, you should be able to use the restore CD's on a new hard drive.

 

[urchin]

@dkryan:

Just for $hits and giggles why not try using chkdsk /r and
SFC/SCANNOW

It's easy to do and these is nothing to lose, heck you might be surprised.

Give it a try and tell us what happens.

 

[Cujet]

I was able to delete about 20 gigs by removing iTunes duplicate song files. I keep my songs on external drives and the internal storage drives. That way my super fast SSD is not loaded with unnecessary data.