Windows 7 - missing: almost 45 gb of hard drive space

hi peoples! i need a bit of help: for some reason, my computer is telling me that my spare harddrive has less memory than there should be. the hdd is an old 160gb drive, which in reality has 149gb. after filling up the drive with 70gb of backup, it shows that i have 35 gb left. so where did the other 45 gb go? i highlighted all the files with CRTL+A, but it still only showed 70gb.

Do you have a windows.old folder located in the root of your C drive?

Bill

err... windows.old? i forgot to mention that im still using xp

Ok, then you wouldn't have it. Windows.old is created when you upgrade operating systems.

Take a look here to see what is taking up all of your hard drive space.

Best Free Disk Space Analyzer

Bill

I suggest using TreeSizeFree to figure out where all the space is going. it's a free download, very small and is a simple executable (thus nothing to install)

Run WinDirStat, it will tell you what's on your disk.

well, ive run windirstat before, and checking it again now, its telling me exactly the same information as before: nothing. it says that i have a total of 105 gb (69 used, 36 free, which adds up to 105), which makes no sense since if i get the properties of the drive, it says 'capacity: 149gb', 'used: 112 gb', and 'free 36.6gb'. the only point windirstat and the computer agree on is that there are 36.6/7 gb free

Windirstat is showing you the size of your drive as windows sees it (the partition size.)

Right-click on my computer, then click manage. Go to "disk management" and take a screenshot of that. Post the screenshot here and we will be able to tell you what is going on.

there's nothing wrong with the drives. i know that much. yet i cannot find where the 45 gb went

its drive s thats missing the space

Lets have a look into your shadowstorage situation. Open an elevated Command Prompt (run as admin) and type vssadmin list shadowstorage. For C, you get 3 numbers: Used, Allocated and Maximum. Post those 3 numbers or the cmd window.