Missing almost half of my disk space on vista

Well, I'm hoping to set up a dual-boot with ubuntu with my new laptop brcause Vista is being idiotic. But it seems vista is preventing me from doing even that!

I was sabout to set up the partitions so i've been defraging and really looking closely at my disk space. Heres what I found.

The disk says that I am using 53.9 GB of space.

I then selected all the sub-folders and looked at their size. It came out to 29.1 GB

Thats 24.8 GB of space missing...

Do I have permission to say WTF!?!?!?!?!?!

(I'm showing hidden folders too, btw) does anyone know where all my space has gone?

I have no real experience with Vista, so just guessing

the system restore and file indexing features of Vista may be the culprit here.
It may be that you (as a non-admin user) do not have permission to interrogate the size of absolutely everything, hence it appears you've lost disk space.

Hmm.... I've been looking it up... Apparently it can use a max of 15% of your disk space. So, with me that would be 20 GB. I'll disable it and see what happens.

EDIT: HURAH! Now i'm only missing 5 GB of space! Thats okay though. I just needed to make it small enough to partition and forget about.

make sure you give ubuntu 4Gb as a bare minimum

I never turn off System Restore. The thought of doing so scares me.

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Originally Posted by Identity X

I never turn off System Restore. The thought of doing so scares me.

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yes, well....
system restore is not a substitute for backups

"Tell me Mr. Anderson, what good is a restore point if you cannot boot"

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Originally Posted by Ynot

yes, well....
system restore is not a substitute for backups

"Tell me Mr. Anderson, what good is a restore point if you cannot boot"

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Stop it, that brings back terrible memories. And no, not of the movie!

Right now i'm still fighting to win back my space from vista. Theres some files that really don't want to move in the defragments and they're stopping me from shrinking the drive as much as I want to >:(

I'm running a evaluation version of a hardcore defragger now though. This should do the job. But I see i've got a nice little directory file at the very end of my disk. I'll post here again if I need help moving that.

Oh, and theres another recovery partition on my computer anyways. Its to factory settings, but thats okay with me. I Might even just wipe windows if theres too many problems with this.

you can use the partition resizing in Ubuntu
(as windows won't be running, it can move everything)

You've got a 300Gb disk for heavens sake, you shouldn't have space issues

Boot into Ubuntu
and start the install program
From here, you can resize any and all partitions on the disk

Then install ubuntu using the "largest contiguous free space" or whatever option

Next time you boot Windows, it'll will complain about the resized partition being dirty, and insist on doing a full scandisk, but thats normal.

ahahaha... true

and its 160 GB (bout 145 GiB) not 300. You need to work on your maths.

And I guess the main reason i'm fretting so much about space is because 20 GB extra dissapeared making it seem like I was gonna use up alot more space.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by arby

and its 160 GB (bout 145 GiB) not 300. You need to work on your maths.

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well, that was embarrassing...:shock:

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Originally Posted by Identity X

I never turn off System Restore. The thought of doing so scares me.

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System restore can be pretty evil. The first thing I do is turn it off. Not only does it steal disk space and affect performance (disk i/o is among the most time-consuming operations), but it will happily back up viruses. Everytime someone's called me over to fix a virus, the virus kept coming back, until I realized it was living it up in the system restore area as well.

If you don't have anything important to back up, no reason to bother... if you do, you should do it properly (at least burn a CD or scp it to another system).