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Need Help: My hard disk is shrinking

Gryffindorian

Gryffindorian

Vice Admiral
Admiral
Not sure whether this is Media- or Technology-related, but I thought I'd start here in MISC.

I have an aging Dell XPS PC; Windows Vista Premium SP2; Intel Core 2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40 GHz; 2.0 GB RAM; NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2; 250 GB Hard Drive (C:) + 500 GB Internal Hard Drive (R:).

My problem is that my PC has been crashing (freezing up) more often upon start-up, prompting me to power down the computer manually. I restart the computer normally. When I run a Disk Clean-Up, I notice that the available hard disk space is a few gigabytes less than it used to be, although I haven't necessarily installed programs or saved a lot of files on my C: drive.

For instance, I remember I had at least 100 GB before I installed City of Heroes game. That took up about 3 GB, plus additional downloaded game updates. The available space was now 95 GB, and after another crash, it became 93 GB, then 92 GB. Now it's down to 91 GB.

I tried to Google some information, and the only remedy I found was to download and install CC Cleaner, hoping to reclaim some lost space, and it yielded about 5 GB before my computer started crashing again. So when my computer crashes, I run CC Cleaner, but it deletes only so many megabytes. At this point, I don't even know what's going on and would like to know if there's anything I can do to prevent my PC from crashing any further and losing hard disk space.

Can anyone help?
 
Physical head crashes will cause some sectors to become unreadable, therefore causing there to be less "space".

If you plan to keep using the machine, you should find a way to image your OS and info onto a new HDD. That would keep you from having to reinstall, unless you'd prefer to do that.
 
Ar-Pharazon said:
Physical head crashes will cause some sectors to become unreadable, therefore causing there to be less "space".
Click to expand...

Head crashes would also destroy software the OP has installed. It doesn't just consume space.

Gryffindorian said:
Can anyone help?
Click to expand...

Get this free program: hddhealth

http://download.cnet.com/HDD-Health/3000-2086_4-10804806.html

See what % health your hard disk has. If it is particularly low, then is time to replace it. I've always felt that anything less than 100% means that trouble is brewing, but a lot of disks have <100% and will work fine. If my hard disk fell below 50% health, I'd buy a new disk that same day.

Also look here...
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/index.php

The people who use majorgeeks are experts on all manner of computer problems. Create a new thread in the forums and read to what they have to say. Some will be rather blunt and tell you straight what to do and expect you to do it. It's up to you whether you follow their advice.
 
Last edited:
Sounds like the shadow copy service, but I'm not sure how that functions in Home Premium. I know in Ultimate it eats up a set amount of free space incrementally in order to maintain previous versions of every file and I've read that the service still runs in the other versions of Vista even though you can't access the function, but I'm not sure if that's true. The way you describe it is similar to something I've experienced sometimes after installing new software and I'm pretty sure in my case it is down to the shadow copy service.

How much of your disk space is reserved for restoration files? (Control Panel --> System --> Advanced System Settings --> System Protection tab --> Configure button --> Slider) It should be around 10%.
 
Thank you all for your input. Assuming that my C: drive is in bad shape or health, would it then be easier for me to make my "other" hard drive my bootable/system drive? Can I install Windows on there and migrate all my files and programs from the C: drive?
 
Update: Jadzia, I downloaded and ran HDD Health; my C: drive is at 98% level efficiency. Now here's the odd thing: HDD says I have 100 GB of 245 GB available on C; whereas Windows Disk Clean-Up says I'm currently down to 93 GB. :confused:
 
93 vs 100 is the difference between counting gigabytes and billions of bytes.

a kilobyte is 1024 bytes, yet we often use kilo- to mean 1000.
So a megabyte is 1024*1024 = 1048576 bytes (1.048 millions of bytes)
And a gigabyte is 1024*1024*1024 = 1073741824 bytes (1.073 billions of bytes)

See that 93GB * 1.073 = 100GB

93 gigabytes is 100 billion bytes.

Some new words have been invented to clear up that mess: The gibibyte is 2^30 bytes, and the gigabyte is used in the classic metric sense meaning one billion (10^9) bytes. It's not popular nomenclature, so it isn't used consistently. Gigabyte can mean either.
 
that whole fiasco is why I set my samurize widgets to report drive space in megabytes instead of gigabytes . . . removes a factor of estimation error
 
I'd be happier if we had just kept kilo et al with dual meanings, like it was in the 1990s :
- 1000 when we're measuring grams and meters and hertz, etc;
- 1024 when we're measuring things which have underlying powers of binary.
 
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