HD Space being used.... But by what?

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So I got a little problem on my hands and I'm completely dumbfounded by it. My C Drive is 10 GB's, (I know small). My doc and settings folder has using 1 gig of space, my Program files is taking 1 gig of space, and my Windows folder is using 4 gigs of space..... My Drive has 1 gig of space free. Any Ideas at all where that extra 3 gigs is at? This has been frustrating me for a while now and have no Idea whats up.
 
It's your boot record (partition table) that's the problem.

When you startup you comp, the BIOS reads the Master Boot Record (MBR) of your master drive. The MBR has a list of boot records (or partition tables). It must have at least one. Each boot record lists the info for that partition including it's size. Either when the partition was created it didn't use all the hard drive space or the boot record has been accidentally overwritten with an incorrect size.

There are two ways to correct this. You can use Recovery Console and run fixboot and fixmbr or some disk partition manager. Or you can manually edit the boot record using PTedit. The latter is tricky and if you make a mistake, it could disable your computer.
 
I'm a little confused. Are you saying the MBR is taking up 3 gigs of space? Because my C Drive properties says There is 9 gigs in use and 1 gig free space. But my folder properties of the three parent folders read only 6 gigs used space. It's always told me the partition was 10 gigs though.
 
PureComplacency said:
I'm a little confused. Are you saying the MBR is taking up 3 gigs of space? Because my C Drive properties says There is 9 gigs in use and 1 gig free space. But my folder properties of the three parent folders read only 6 gigs used space. It's always told me the partition was 10 gigs though.

No. What I meant is the boot record (or partition table) outlines the size of the partition. If that record gets overwritten and the value for the size of the partition changed, it's reflected in your Windows settings. The original size of the partition may have been 10 GB but somehow the boot record got overwriten and it's listed as 6 GB which Windows displays. The real size is still 10 GB (or whatever when it was formatted.)
 
I went into the Recovery Console and did Fixmbr and it prompted me saying that if I could access my partitions I shouldn't do it because it could end up erasing some data. So I didn't do it. Is that normal?
 
PureComplacency said:
I went into the Recovery Console and did Fixmbr and it prompted me saying that if I could access my partitions I shouldn't do it because it could end up erasing some data. So I didn't do it. Is that normal?

Yes, the warning is normal and I goofed a bit asking you to run fixmbr. You should only run fixboot. You run fixmbr is you're having problems booting to your default installation.

Did the fixboot correct your missing disk space problem?
 
I did the SequoiaView thing and aparantly C:\pagefile.sys and C:\WINDOWS\MEMORY.DMP are both 2 Gigs. Do I need these? and if not how do I get rid of them.
 
Yes, both are temporary files and can be deleted. It won't mess anything up as Windows will create new ones if necessary.
 
Uhm.. You cannot delete the pagefile (while in WIndows anyway) and the deletion would be useless, since the thing is recreated at next boot..

In system properties, you can set the initial pagefile size to something smaller and adjust the memory dump settings so that it creates only a small dump file or nothing at all in case of a system crash.
 
Yes, you cannot delete pagefile.sys while Windows is running. You need to go into Recovery Console and then you can delete pagefile.sys.
 
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