Hard drive near full but cannot find files

[klop]

Hi all,

 

On a couple of our newer PCs the hard drive is near full.

 

These are only 120gb SSD but should be ok, the others in the room have around 40gig free ish.

 

But I cannot find the files taking up al the space.

 

I've enabled viewing hidden and system files.

 

System Restore is switched off.

 

I've deleted all users folders. Recycle bin is empty.

 

Disk Cleanup shows just 130mb that can be deleted.

 

I assume it's some tmp files somewhere that I do not have access to when looking at the properties for all files from the root drive? The properties shows around 40gig used.

 

 

PCs are HP ProDesk 400 running Windows 7 Pro joined to the domain with no roaming profiles but folder redirection.

 

Thanks.

[RalphG]

Hi

 

Tree size free is your friend for this.

 

use it to scan SSD and see what's taking the space.

 

https://www.jam-software.de/customers/downloadTrial.php?article_no=80

 

also if you are running windows updates the winsxs folder can get very big.

 

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/commercialize/manufacture/desktop/clean-up-the-winsxs-folder

Edited September 12, 2016 by RalphG

[Cazale]

Have a look in c:\windows\installer. It grows each time you install anything and in my experience, can grow to be massive.

 

Microsoft advise you don't delete anything in the Windows folder (as you might imagine). In a pinch I deleted it (well, rather moved it over to a share on the server) from one machine over summer and had a string of headaches with it afterwards (i.e. to give one example, icons not appearing, and then the icon cache refusing to rebuild). So if the folder is massive, you may be best just building a fresh image.

[3s-gtech]

Also, have a look at Patch Cleaner. I've had good results with it, but obviously test it thoroughly before using in production. It typically cleaned 15GB from our 64GB SSDs - enough to keep them in action for a good while yet.

[LeMarchand]

Also, have a look at Patch Cleaner. I've had good results with it, but obviously test it thoroughly before using in production. It typically cleaned 15GB from our 64GB SSDs - enough to keep them in action for a good while yet.

 

+1 for this. Used it on a couple of tablets to great effect. If the PCs have Java, JDiskReport | JGoodies will produce easy-to-understand pie charts of where the space is being used.

[Duke5A]

The SequoiaView Homepage

 

This will give a graphical representation of the largest files/folders on the drive.

[gaz350b]

Check Offline files cache

[Julian]

We had a similar problem, it turned out that the default install for the nVidia drivers was over 20Gb! A custom install of just the driver saved over 15 Gb, but it had to be done per machine, and not as part of the standard build.

 

I agree about using Treesize or WinDirStat (no install needed) to find where the disk space has gone.