Unknown "Files" Consuming Hard Drive Space

[J's Sin]

Hello all,

This is going to be an obscure problem, so thanks VERY much in advance.

My roommate decided that, to clean up his computer, he'd reformat, then move everything back in. Seemed fine, he'd done it before without problems, 'nuff said there. He's had his 120GB hard drive partitioned off, with the C drive being somewhere around 5 GB, the others of significantly larger size.

The problem lies here-in. After reformatting and moving things back in, the C drive, which he does keep uncluttered, somehow is occupied by 2.2 GB of "Files". A third-party program merely revealed this occupied space as "Files", and they don't count as hidden files, as allowing hidden files to be seen did nothing.

Now, he does have a fairly large amount of information spread out over the other partitions, and the second partitioned hard drive, a 160 GB one. Can this mass-consumption be attributed to the registry at all, to having a pagefile size allowing up to 2000 MB, or from some sort of glitch that requires manual repair? Or am I completely missing the mark, and it's something altogether different?

Thanks, and if you need more info, I'll see if I can't acquire it.

J's Sin

 

[Lord Kalthorn]

He reformated?

And there are files on the C Drive? There should have been nothing but Windows wehen he restarted?

 

[J's Sin]

That's what we thought too...

He's thinking about just reformatting... You wouldn't happen to know any sort of solution to this, would you?

 

[Dynamix]

Hello There
u did a quick reformat or u just reinstalled xp on the same drive without formatting it!

 

[Lord Kalthorn]

Yeah, that sounds like the most likely cause. Do a full Format.

 

[zero4zero]

I don't understand why someone with a 120 Gig hard drive would partition it to make the main C drive only 5 Gig! When you will load up programs where will they end up! Where is the swapfile?
I would burn what ever important data on the hard disk and not only do a complete format but also partition the hard disk adequately. A small partition a few gig just for the swapfile, 40 gig for the main C drive and the rest for storage partition. Note your main C by default takes most of your program files, your documents and most of microsoft shared data.

 

[J's Sin]

Thanks, all, for the replies. My apologies that my own is so belated.

He partitioned off the 5 gigs because it was pretty much all he needed for Windows, paging files, and the other basics. Everything else, he routed off to other drives/partitions.

Just on a tangent, could this perhaps be a physical problem? He's reformated again since then to see if the space wasn't occupied by pointerless files, and the problem remained.