Missing HDD space – says 65GB used, selecting all folders shows 40GB used

disk-space-utilizationhard drivewindows-server-2008

Running Windows Server 2008, 74GB raptor drive and noticed we only had about 500MB left – yikes!

So deleted some old backups we don't need, but can't track down where about 25GB seems to be taken up. If I go to C: and select all folders and go to properties, this comes to around 40GB but in My Computer I can see 65GB is used.

How can I find out whats eating the space?

Just IIS + MSSQL Express + Smartermail on the server

EDIT Checked to show hidden folders plus protected operating system files – 41.8GB usage, so 24.6GB is missing somewhere. Theres no system restore even installed on the server

Best Answer

Try this free program and see if it can help you. Should show you amount of space used per directory.

Also check how much your hard drive is fragmented, this surely didn't take your 35GB but could loose you couple of megs.

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This might not be the most direct solution, but you may want to try this. Linux doesn't obey NTFS permissions, it just loads the entire drive and lets you access whatever you want. You could boot off of a linux Live CD and use that to copy the files off.

Another approach would be to use the command line permissions editor to change all of the permissions. The program is icacls, and there is documentation for it on TechNet.

icacls "E:\path\to\folder\" /grant %USERNAME%:F /t

...will give full permissions to the user running the command to all folders and files in that directory, and all subdirectories. I tested it with a directory tree I had removed all read permissions from, and it worked on all the files in it. If you don't have ownership of the files, you may want to run

icacls "E:\path\to\folder\" /setowner %USERNAME% /t

to make yourself the owner of the files, then run the grant command above, once you have ownership. You may need to run these commands in an elevated command prompt.

Linux shows much less disk space then summary of all disks

How are the MD devices configured? If you use a RAID1 (mirroring) or Raid5 (striped with parity), you will loose capacity. A RAID1 will have half the capacity of all disks, and a RAID5 will have the capacity of n-1 disks.