After running CCleaner with the wipe free space enabled, my hard drive mysteriously took up 87 GB. Before running, it took up 27 GB. The screenshot below explains my situation fairly well.
As you can see, absolutely nothing is taking up 60 GB of free space on my 100 GB hard drive.
ccleaner creates a temp file while deleting free space. Download WinDirStat http://windirstat.info/ to locate the file taking up the huge space.
It is removed at the end of cleaning. you may have interupted the process.
... Download WinDirStat http://windirstat.info/ ...
Completely unrelated to the OP ... interesting tool !! Hadn't come across that one before ... thanks ident.
Thanks, I was able to I resolve the problem.
Also, I really like that program, I'm leaving it installed. Thanks.
It's a fantastic little app.
It's a fantastic little app.
Yep, I've pinched it off you for another thread.
Pleased i could help (
Can anyone help me?
I am having the same problem as the OP and I have downloaded the WinDirStat but to no avail I cant detect the 'fake file' CCleaner made that took up the space. I am really having trouble with this problem and any help would be really much appreciated.
After many searches and tries, I managed to alleviate around 100GB of the fake space filler by using the Disk Cleanup and choosing to remove 'System Restore and Shadow Copies' from the 'More Options' tab. So I guess that might have done the trick.
However, my C: disk only uses around 56GB while from the 'Properties' of the C: Drive it shows 64GB, so is there still problem? Or is this values normal? Im not very knowledgeable about this but the gap of 8GB seems a bit too big.
Also of note, Im using Vistax64.
Any advice/help would be very helpful.
PS: Now Im afraid to ever touch that option in CCleaner ever again.
Two views of Drive C:\ :-
The "internal" view on the right shows MOST files, but not all, only those that Windows Explorer can show you.
MOST files excludes any folder to which you are denied rights, e.g. other users profiles,
and also things that only defragmenters can see, such as MFT zone and Metadata (dont know what that is, I only know that it is),
and also possibly other things I know nothing about, which would make my head hurt worse.
These MOST files have an artificial "size" of 7 GB which would be consumed if they were NOT NTFS compressed,
These MOST files have a genuine "Size on Disk" that shows they consume
6,266,238,039 bytes
The "external" view on the left shows the actual storage consumed as used space,
6,741,970,944 bytes.
6,741,970,944 - 6,266,238,039 = 475,732,905 bytes more than Explorer will show me.
I have a 160 GB drive of which only 15 GB is allocated to C:\, and only 6 GB is used, with 475 MB un-shown files
You live on a much grander scale - perhaps 10 times on everything,
and I would estimate that if everything I had was 10 times larger, I would have a 4.75 GB discrepancy,
so your 8 GB discrepancy seems not unreasonable.
Finally, I use 32 bit XP Home edition with SP3, which I understand on limited hardware can RUN, where Vista can only CRAWL,
so perhaps Vista has given you a lot more semi-visible no-file luggage than XP does.
I am not sure, but I think the MFT zone is proportional to the size of the partition.
Alan