Who can figure out this puzzle?

[Pleeeease!]

I'm having an issue on this computer. It is an HP Pavillion Pentium duo core, 3 Gigs of ddr ram, and a 225 gb hard drive. It has Windows XP Media w/ service pack 3. I've had this computer about 4 years and is currently running good, no slowing down or weird stuff. In that period of time I've done the console recovery to due extreme virus/trojan attacts 3X's (all of which have occured in the last couple of months, don't go to Pirate's Bay!). The issue I'm having is mystery nothingness filling up my hard drive, about 140 GBs worth. ?

When the hard drive first read that it was reaching capacity, I searched and searched and could only find roughly 80 GB of stuff. I've checked the backup utility and erased any back up folders in the system, as well as any temp folders, I've essentially erased most of my personal documents and media, and I've cleaned the disk and checked it for any errors (I thought maybe it just blocked out sectors that it thought was bad, but no errors). All of this finagling with the drive gained me 60 GB of space. Which is exactly proportional to what I could determine as far as used up memory on the hard drive. At this point my 225 GB hard drive says it has 160gb of stuff in there. Throughout this whole ordeal it has maintained a steady approximate of 140 GB of hidden stuff or whatever that it's reading as filling the hard drive.

I've used two different software to read files on the hard drive (sequioa view and pie chard) and those confirm my original findings. Still left with mystery nothingness filling my hard drive?

I consider myself fairly handy on computers but this one has me. Who out there is bigger and badder to figure this one out?

 

[johnb35]

Why are you creating another thread about the same issue?

 

[atomichybrid]

They could be system restore files that take up most of the space, unless you call your backups, system restore files. These files are used for, returning to the state where your computer last worked. The way to take them out is through disk cleanup and click the more options tab and click clean on the system restore section. This is usually not recommended to do, but if your confident nothing will happen then by all means.

 

[Pleeeease!]

Heeelp!

I had gone through and cleaned the disk thoroughly. There's an untouched section in partion D:// which is the recovery console that hp puts in (If I mess that up I may lose windows if anything corrupts the system again, not an option). When I go to disk clean up it doesn't give any further options nor the option to delete files (because I've cleaned them all out.



I guess it feels good in a way that nobody here is any smarter than me at solving puter issues.

 

[johnb35]

Did you ever run that program called sequoiaview? It will tell you exactly where all the space goes to.

 

[Pleeeease!]

Yes John.

Thanks for the input but I did run both Sequoia View and Pie Chart. Neither show any anomalies are consistent with the information I've been able to track down. Still, 140 gb being read of information that shouldn't exist, that it shouldn't be reading.