Windows 7: lost space on hard after defrag

Hi everyone,


Today i defragmentated my PC, i have 3 partitions, C in which i installed windows and programs, D for downloads and other stuff, and E for games, movie making and others. I used defrag today, on C i won 0.5 GB, on D nothing changed but on E i've lost over 40 GB.

E has 197 GB overall, 121 are used and 23.2 GB are free, so i miss 42GB, lost today after defrag.

What can i do to recover those GB back?


Thanks,

For both Vista and 7
Hard Disk Space - Free Up and Recover

It does not help.

I have lost HDD space after using defrag instead of winning some. What it says there are basic stuff and i can't see how any of those options can give my GB's back!

Lets see how the space is used:
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

Do you have system protection turned on for E: drive? If yes, turn it off.

Disable System Restore in Windows 7 - How-To Geek

Also i want to say that i tryed to back up my system and on particion E and I saw that "System Image" has 49 GB, exactly my missing space (almost). But what's that?

http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/7735/84511319.png


Bill, it's Off, only for C it's on.

You don't really 'gain' any free space from defragging; a defrag only rearranges file fragments to make them contiguous (well, you may gain tiny bit of space if the drive was highly fragmented initially and post-defrag free space consolidation was very good).

As to your problem, it's quite puzzling but seems to be not uncommon. I really don't know the solution, but am thinking out loud: I used to think a loss in disk space after running the native defrag utilities in Vista and Windows 7 arose from the incompatibility between the native defragger and the shadow copy service (although system restore is disabled on E volume, I *think* VSS may still be active since you have SR enabled for C..I am not at all sure of this). However, see this post here by GeneO
Strange things happening on w7
that states that the vista/7 defraggers are VSS-aware. I suspect this compatibility is still not up to the mark, and the windows defragger is what is causing the (temporary) loss of space.

I am not certain of any of the above stuff, so take it FWIW .

Run auslogix defrag and see what that reports.

Disk Defrag - Fast and Safe Defragmenter for Your Disks

techcal i will try later.


bill, i already did that, and after aprox. 6 min i lost another 2 gb so i canceled defrag.


damn -40 gb

Did you run antivirus and download and scan with malwarebytes. Full scan and updated?