Lost space after formatting

Bubbles77

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South Africa
Hi guys, this is my first post, please be kind.

I did search but the posts didn't help me much or were way to technical for me.

I have an HP laptop that I got from someone, I wanted to change the info so that my name was everywhere (not his). I followed instructions on a site on how to copy a user profile onto another profile so the old one could be deleted (thus the old name would be gone) and all was going swimmingly buuuut what they failed to tell you from the very beginning is that you need to have the OS software (Windows XP Professional, 2002, I do not have the disk).

Long story short, my PC crashed, I had to reformat (do an emergency recovery) but the laptop did automatically make a back up (in a file under my C drive).

So now, there are obviously less programs on the laptop, lost due to the reformat but my WHOLE C drive is full suddenly. I can't remember how much space I had before, but I know I had 86g of free space, now suddenly I only have the 86g on my WHOLE C drive and it's full.

I googled a bit and read that it could be due to having two Windows files, which I did (one in my back up) so I deleted that one with no issues. I tried to delete the program files (in the same back up folder too) but it won't let me.

I also have a D drive, HP Recovery that I can do NOTHING with. When I try explore there is a locked folder and it tells me that this area of my hard drive contains files used for my system recovery (so I am assuming that there is a backup of everything in there too). According to the defrag, that file is only 6.47g.

I can't even do a proper defragmenter because there is not enough space, but I have done a disk cleanup, compressed files, etc, etc, etc but I have only been able to free up a few MB's to get a total of 1.11g free space.

Please can you guys help a humble girl by explaining to me nicely, and simply, how to get the extra space back?

Thanks and have a super day! :lol:
 
Hummmm....Who use the program Hetman Partition Recovery? Yesterday I recovered formatted partition on the hard drive, is it good enough to buy it? Just a great program, if such situations occur as accidental deletion or if viruses deleted something, has smbd used it? I think it's a good program for collection ,not expensive ,but don't know is it worth to buy it?
Maybe it could help u ;)
 
Last edited:
Probably need to check a few things.

Change in Size:
Click Start > Right click Computer > Click Manage
In left-pane, Go to: Storage > Disk Management > Click (C: ) in upper right pane.

In the attachment, notice the 60GB of unallocated space. This is part of the drive that Windows cannot write to. See any unallocated space? If so, you need to extend the partition which will require additional software.

No free space:
This could be an issue with Shadow Storage (hidden from file explorers & used for backup/restores).

Press Windows + R, type "cmd" and Enter.
Type: "vssadmin list shadows"

To delete (cannot recover), type: "vssadmin delete shadows /for=c:"

Hope that works!
 

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