Thread: 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.

Originally Posted by Identity X

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

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

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

Originally Posted by Identity X

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

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).