Tom's Guide | Tom's Hardware | Tom's Games
 |
 |
 |
I inherited a Lenovo 3000 N100 from my dad. He had problems with Vista and installed XP. I am not sure if he uninstalled Vista or wiped the hard drive properly before installing XP. The computer has a 120Gig hard drive and I recently upgraded to 4Gigs of RAM (although it is only able to utilize 3).
Recently, a notification said that my hard drive was too full to run a scheduled backup. Sure enough, when I right clicked on the "C:" drive on my computer the pie chart shows that it is full. I have since then turned the rescue and recovery setting to the lowest possible disk space and deleted all system backups up to the present. I have run a de-frag, and disk cleanup, as well as WebRoot Windows washer. I have removed almost all of the Music and Movies from my computer. To the best of my knowledge I have less than 20G of space taken up from everything on my computer. Still the hard drive says that there is 69.4G of space taken up on "C:".
I ran a program called "JDisk Report" which tells you everything that is on your hard drive. Just as I had calculated this program said that there was only 17.2G on hard disk "C:".
How can I locate and wipe the superfluous data from my hard drive?
Is it possible that Vista is still on the hard drive with all of its backups and other wastes of space? if so, is it possible to get rid of Vista without having to reinstall XP?
Click start, run, type diskmgmt.msc & press enter.
What drives are listed & their size?
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0 
Go to system properties, advanced, startup & recovery settings. Click the drop down menu under default operating system. How many are there?
If Vista is still there reboot & look for it before it goes to XP. You have about 30 seconds to hit the arrow. See if it boots to it.
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
It just occurred to me. Vista has a hidden recovery partition that doesn't show in disk management. Here's how do delete it. Sorry I didn't think of it before.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sho...
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
thanks, that sounds like it will do the trick. I will try it tomorrow.
You are one good looking guapo!!!
0
Disk management only shows one partition. If Vista's recovery partition is still present it is not visible from XP. I will just have to DBaN the HD and re-install XP.
0
No, boot with gparted. It's a free download. Burn it to a CD.
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
By your own numbers that is not be the reason for the low disk space notification. If there were a Vista partition the shown partition would be smaller than 111GB.
Without explaining why your total space of 111GB is roughly what a 120GB formatted drive should show.
Most likely reasons for the discrepancy is your recycle bin. Could also be slack space, if the drive is formatted using FAT32. FAT32 would waste a large amount of storage space. The reason for that is that every file on your computer must occupy a cluster. Using FAT32 on a 120GB drive results in 32kb clusters.
That means a file of ONLY 1kb will use 32kb of space. This is called slack space and accounts for the differences in the numbers.
The actual total file size on the drive is different than the occupied space. This occurs to a lesser degree even with NTFS. However, the default cluster size for NTFS is 4kb.
There are other causes for the numbers you see but for now go to disk management and see how the partition is formatted. And empty the recycle bin.
0
That's 100% correct. The recycle bin has to be empty to count the correct available space.
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
disk management says that the partition is formatted NTFS. recycle bin is empty.
can I boot with gparted and get a better look without reformatting?
0
You don't have to reformat. Just boot with gparted to see what's there.
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
Something is using the extra storage. Try running disk cleanup. Go to Start> help and support> tools> disk cleanup.
You could be using too much space for Windows restore files, for the page file, or the temporary internet files.
If your hard drive is truly a 120GB then you don't have any hidden partitions.
Watch the POST screens at startup to see what size drive you actually have.
You can also do a good job of cleaning up junk by using CCleaner slim. Get it below.
0
I can't believe it. I discovered a "lenovo rescue and recovery" that is different than and in addition to Windows rescue and recovery. It was using up all of the extra space. I was able to delete the unwanted backups from within lenovo rescue and recovery program and use the same program to backup my HD to and external HD.
Thanks for all the help.
0
For future reference, the true HDD capacity is approx 93% of the advertised capacity.
120GB x 93% = 111.6GB
0
Wow, I didn't know that Lenovo had that. I have a Lenovo. I wiped Vista & installed FreeBSD. I wonder if those recovery partitions are still there. Did you find it with gparted?
How do you know when a politician is lying? His mouth is moving.
0
Click start, run, type diskmgmt.msc & press enter.
What drives are listed & their size?
Htfcreativ.com
206-338-2535
0
As was stated before your 120GB hard drive is only actually 111GB due to the two methods of calculation. (1000/1024)
So, there is no other partition on that hard drive, hidden or otherwise.
Multiply the advertised size by .93 and you will arrive at the actual store space. That works for any hard drive.
0  |
 Can't open certain progra...
|
Media files freeze and un...
|
This post is quite old and has been locked from receiving new replies. Please create a new posting instead.
| Ads by Google |
