Unaccounted for space

Lago

I've been having a recurring problem with my home built PC over the last two months. Basically every couple of weeks it will just go into these fits of freezing. It will freeze when on the desktop or browsing the internet (never happens when gaming). There is no blue screen or anything, it just freezes as is and if you restart the computer this will continue to happen for a day or two. Then it will just randomly stop and won't happen again for a while. I've had days where it's frozen 6 times and then ran fine for several weeks before it started freezing again.

Despite asking in several places, no one has ever been able to suggest a reason for this. I suspect it might be the harddrive but I can't get proof of it. I did bring the computer to a repair shop to remove a virus before this freezing issue came along and the guy said that the computer seemed to be running a lot of disk configurations. He also said that there was a folder on the C: drive called "FOUND" that was full of copies of files from other parts of the computer that had been copied during these disk configurations. He said the folder was right there but when I brought the PC home, it was nowhere to be seen.

Tonight, however, I was cleaning out the C: drive and according to the My Computer screen, about 280GB is taken up but when I look at each individual folders properties, the total size only comes to about 90GB so I'm wondering if this is what the repair guy was talking about.

I mean I looked up the size of Windows 7 and it says 20GB. All games I play (Crusader Kings 2, Mount & Blade, Football Manager etc.) as less than 3GB in size. So I just can't understand what could be taking up the rest of the space.

Edit: Also is there any way to rest factory settings to a custom made PC if you haven't made a backup?

Mr. G

Lago wrote: »

I've been having a recurring problem with my home built PC over the last two months. Basically every couple of weeks it will just go into these fits of freezing. It will freeze when on the desktop or browsing the internet (never happens when gaming). There is no blue screen or anything, it just freezes as is and if you restart the computer this will continue to happen for a day or two. Then it will just randomly stop and won't happen again for a while. I've had days where it's frozen 6 times and then ran fine for several weeks before it started freezing again.

Despite asking in several places, no one has ever been able to suggest a reason for this. I suspect it might be the harddrive but I can't get proof of it. I did bring the computer to a repair shop to remove a virus before this freezing issue came along and the guy said that the computer seemed to be running a lot of disk configurations. He also said that there was a folder on the C: drive called "FOUND" that was full of copies of files from other parts of the computer that had been copied during these disk configurations. He said the folder was right there but when I brought the PC home, it was nowhere to be seen.

Tonight, however, I was cleaning out the C: drive and according to the My Computer screen, about 280GB is taken up but when I look at each individual folders properties, the total size only comes to about 90GB so I'm wondering if this is what the repair guy was talking about.

I mean I looked up the size of Windows 7 and it says 20GB. All games I play (Crusader Kings 2, Mount & Blade, Football Manager etc.) as less than 3GB in size. So I just can't understand what could be taking up the rest of the space.

Edit: Also is there any way to rest factory settings to a custom made PC if you haven't made a backup?

Anything on the C: drive would include Windows and any Program Files, so basically everything on the computer.

I don't understand fully your second question. If your PC is very cluttered you could install Windows and install the games then. Don't forget to backup anything that is important obviously.

Lago

Thanks for the reply

Mr. G wrote: »

Anything on the C: drive would include Windows and any Program Files, so basically everything on the computer.

That's what confused me though. Windows 7 is 30GB (according to it's system requirements) and I have 6 games on my system. The biggest is 12GB, the next is 2.8GB and the rest are less than 1GB. As I said, I added up the size of folders in the C: drive and it came to about 90GB but the C: Drive properties screen says 283GB are in use. I don't understand what could be using up 190GB without me being able to find it.

I don't understand fully your second question. If your PC is very cluttered you could install Windows and install the games then. Don't forget to backup anything that is important obviously.

I mean that this is a home built PC and I forgot to make a restore point when I first built it. I'm wondering is there a way to to completely wipe the harddrive clean and start again from stratch, as you said, installing Windows and then the games.

BionicRasher

There should be folders in the root directory of the drive called "Found.000", "Found.001", etc.
If you’re not able to see the “Found” folder then first change the folder options to show the file extensions and have a look again. the file extensions should be .chk. Or just run a search for .chk file types
These files are created from the Checkdisk if there is an issue with the disk.
They might get created when file operations are interrupted abnormally. In the case of an USB flash drive or hard drive, that might happen when you physically unplug the device before "Safely Removing Hardware" or if there is a power outage etc before the OS has finished writing data to the drive

A single .CHK file may contain

a single entire file (or multiple entire files),
a part (or multiple parts) of a file (or multiple files) or
a mix of the above.

Maybe there is an issue with your drive that needs to be sorted so maybe these freezes are checkdisk doing its stuff when the issues occur. Might be the drive is losing connection and the OS is in the middle of writing to the drive.

You could clean up the drive and then create a restore point but make sure the first thing you do is a backup and system image for safety. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/restore-computer-from-system-image-backup#1TC=windows-7
You might also create a System Repair disk

If you need to download a fresh version of Windows and do a complete re-install go here and get a copy of the version of Windows that you are running
Make sure you have your product key

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/

install this and take a birds eye look around your hd to see what exactly is taking up all that space

BionicRasher

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar wrote: »

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/onderzoek_informatica/visualization/sequoiaview/

install this and take a birds eye look around your hd to see what exactly is taking up all that space

Try this one too - I find it great and very straight forward and use the pro version in work a lot
http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

Lago

Thanks for the help guys!

I did a search for .chk files and still found no Found folders or files. However, I got 27,000 results and most of these are called File0000.chk, File0001.chk etc.

These are in C:\found.001, C:\found.002 etc. but it says they aren't accessible. Is it safe to delete all of these?

bonzodog2

Lago wrote: »

Thanks for the help guys!

I did a search for .chk files and still found no Found folders or files. However, I got 27,000 results and most of these are called File0000.chk, File0001.chk etc.

These are in C:\found.001, C:\found.002 etc. but it says they aren't accessible. Is it safe to delete all of these?

If you are happy you haven't lost anything, probably. Thats a lot!

Lago

Came to about 100GB

This is rather ironic. I turned on the PC earlier when I came home to follow the advice posted here and the system ran a CHKDSK (I think that's what it's called, I referred to it as Disk Configuration before). I started up the PC with my USB stick pulled in by accident if that has anything to do with it.

Then I went to delete the .chk files to free up space and the PC froze. Since then it has frozen a totaly of 10 times in the last 6 hours. It's taken 3 attempts to write this post. It makes doing anything impossible, other than gaming. A few times it the PC froze up but I could still move the mouse. And since I've to study for a test tomorrow, the annoying thing is that this probably won't be happening in a day or two for several weeks

Is there any programs I can run or tests I can do to find out what is causing this?

Edit: Make that 11 times. And each time I've had to switch the PC off with the power button because it just never comes back.

bonzodog2

I was going to edit my last post to say that that many file fragments recovered could be a sign of a failing disc.

Do you have any hard-to-replace self created documents on this disk? Back them up now.

A "SMART" disk reporting utility would tell you more about the disk's health

Forget about deleting them for now, especially if you need PC to study with

yoyo

Sounds like you have hardware problems, possibly hard drive related. Backup all your important stuff on the hard drive now then run diagnostics (such as Seatools for DOS) to see if the drive is failing. SMART won't always trigger a hard disk failing, seen plenty go with SMART un-tripped so don't be solely reliant on that as an indicator.

Nick

BionicRasher

yoyo wrote: »

Sounds like you have hardware problems, possibly hard drive related. Backup all your important stuff on the hard drive now then run diagnostics (such as Seatools for DOS) to see if the drive is failing. SMART won't always trigger a hard disk failing, seen plenty go with SMART un-tripped so don't be solely reliant on that as an indicator.

Nick

As I said yesterday -most important thing is to get a backup of your data sorted and then go about establishing the cause and try to fix it.

tui0hcg wrote: »

Maybe there is an issue with your drive that needs to be sorted so maybe these freezes are checkdisk doing its stuff when the issues occur. Might be the drive is losing connection and the OS is in the middle of writing to the drive.

You could clean up the drive and then create a restore point but make sure the first thing you do is a backup and system image for safety. http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/restore-computer-from-system-image-backup#1TC=windows-7
You might also create a System Repair disk