Lenovo LS500 Laptop. Vista. 160gig hard drive. Has small Service S: partition 1.5 GB, a small Lenovo Service Q: partition 9.5 GB, and the main C: partition. The C: partition is 137 GB but only shows 32 GB free. I only have about 60 GB of data on this drive so I expect to see closer to 65 GB of free space. I've displayed hidden files, defragged, disk cleanup, lowered size of recovery space to 5 GB, installed and ran treesize (nothing shows there), installed and ran CCleaner, erased temp files, etc. Some of those actions helped (was only 11 GB free) but I can't find the rest. Any ideas? Jeff

Look for large files on your drive. I located a free scanner, but I haven't tried it so I won't vouch for it.

DiskZoom - Free software downloads and reviews - CNET Download.com

I suspect that there may be some program that's logging something onto your hard drive. More than likely, you can delete these files with nothing happening, but you need to find out what they are and where they came from before you do that.

Right click on c: and choose properties, click disk cleanup

When this part is done, click on the tab that says more options

Now click the delete files button next to system restore and shadow copies ( this will only delete previous resotre points, except for the last one made - so your last restore point is saved) and say OK

You should notice a considerable difference when done

Tried both suggestions above (thankyou) but no change.

What did you see? If you don't tell us, we can't help you. The large files that are consuming space on your hard drive won't go away by themselves. You need to figure out why the space is being used and then decide if you want to move some files to storage (CD, etc) or delete them.

OK. Here goes. My 160 GB hard drive is divided into 3 partitions. My computer shows:
C: 137 GB total. 32.8 GB free.
S: 1.47 GB total. 712 MB free.
Q: 9.75 GB total. 4.16 GB free (this is the checkpoint partition).
When I run DiskZoom on the C drive is shows its size as 61 GB total usage. So based on that, 137 GB (size 'My Computer' shows) minus 61 GB equals 76 GB (the amount I think should be free) instead of the 32.8 MB 'My computer' shows to be free. A delta of
43.2 MB.

I guess I'm confused about the delta.

Have you run CHKDSK on this drive? Get into a DOS window (START | RUN enter CMD - click "GO") and run "CHKDSK /F". Let it finish. There may be some large "lost" blocks.

Some of the "slack" may be due to the "slack space" in files, but to have that much slack space (the difference in the space allocated on the drive and the space actually used for a file), you'd have to have a gazillion small files.

Also, in DiskZoom, right-click on the largest "blocks" (the first vertical block should be "C:" If you click on it, the other blocks will be shown at the right. The blocks represent a subdirectory with the largest at the top. If you see a big one, you can follow the columns to the right to see which subdirectories are large. If you see something that's strange, right-click on it and select "Open Containing Folder" to open up the subdirectory in a "windows explorer" window. You can then see the files. Change the view to "DETAILS" and sort on the file size to see the largest files.

If there are any weird-looking large files, post here or Google them and see if they're OK to blow away.

My largest folder is a 20 GB folder of digital photos. Perhaps those have a lot of slack space? I ran CHKDSK and it didn't change the free space. Perhaps the photos are the culprit?

How many of them are there?

There are 10,800 files (photos) 91 subfolders.

That is a lot of files. But at 43 GB, that would be 4 megabytes of slack space per file and Windows doesn't waste nearly that much. The "cluster size" is only 4 kilobytes per file, and you expect, on the average, half of the last cluster will be wasted. So, for 11,000 files, you would expect only about 22 megabytes of slack space.

Nope. I think there is still something that's eating up your space. I still suspect large files. I've seen that happen once before, but I don't remember what caused them. I deleted a whole mess of files and recovered many gigabytes for one friend.

Have you looked into Disk Management? (Start | Run - DiskMgmt.msc - Go) Are there any other partitions that you don't know about?

Just looked at Disk Mgmt. No surprises. Just the 3 partitions I already knew about. It says the C partition is Healthy (boot, page file, crash dump, primary partion). NFTS file system. 0% overhead. 24% free space (32GB of 137GB). TreeSize and DiskZoom all show the same. I'm stumped.

I'm stumped, too. Sorry.

Ok, first off it's Vista, so it's allocating a rather gangly amount of room for the OS and all areas of function in addition to it being an IBM Lenovo, which means there's going to be at least a hidden boot partition around there somewhere that makes ghosting the drive next to impossible. IBM is notorious for doing this, second there's way more trash on your drive than what you're seeing.

Right click anywhere in the open area of your desktop and on the drop down menu, click new, shortcut. You'll be presented with a window that asks for the location path of the item that the shortcut is for. In that location, type in the following (copy and paste the following to make it easier!):

%SystemRoot%\System32\Cmd.exe /c Cleanmgr /sageset:35 & Cleanmgr /sagerun:35

EVERYTHING on this list is JUNK that you don't need to keep, check all the boxes ensuring you scroll down to the bottom of the list and click on the OK button. Now if you have NEVER done this before it will take some time to go through. But once you do it, subsequent runs will be that much faster.

You can also try the additional steps listed here - Keepin' it Clean - Helljack6.com as I've been told by several people that these steps works just as good on Vista as they do on XP, hope it helps.

I had this same problem on my Lenovo thinkpad. Check this out it helped me.
http://www.wikihow.com/Reduce-Shadow-Copy-on-Windows-Vista

Lenovo has a utility called Rescue and Recovery that creates a hidden filesystem that is not accessible by the file system. Go to Thinkvantage - rescue and recovery - view all backups and delete them. You'll recover your space.