Problems with HD space usage, and Recovery Console

Question

Hello, I have two problems, I'm not sure if it's good etiquette to put them on two threads or not, I'll err on the side of putting them together.

The HD space.
Do there exist any utilities that allow you to view hard drive space each folder uses without opening up the properties of each? I have an 80gb drive, supposedly 13 gig free, and can only account for 50 gig used up, at most. This figure I got from doing properties of each folder. I'm running norton antivirus, it's up-to-date. My partitionions don't appear to be out of order, even though fixmbr says it's a non-standard boot partition, I'm assuming that's from Dell. Norton Utils used to have something that would allow you to browse by each folder and see the percentage of usage, but it crashes after about 5 minutes of being busy. Considering WinXP Pro doesn't display folder size in the directory list, and in the tooltip gives an estimate, are there any utils that display a nice bar graph, or will I end up having to write or script something myself?

Recovery Console.
While investigating the disk space issue, I discovered that while in recovery console, except under the windows folders and certain others, it tells me access is denied. Obviously, I made sure administrator had full access to my disk (I don't use that account) and still didn't have access. I set the floppy access/access to all drives and all folders in the local security policy to enabled (it WAS disabled, previously on a domain) and it still doesn't work. Do I have to re-install the recovery console as a boot option, or am I missing something else?

Thank you,
Chris

gryjhnhpe · Answer

If you have System Restore active the HD space may be used by old restore points.
You can delete all but the last restore point by date using "Disk Cleanup" > "More Options" , "System Restore" , "Clean up..." , Yes then Cancel otherwise ticked Cleanup items will be executed.

The System Restore point are in Folder C:\System Volume Information   , it usually shows Empty but still contains Restore Points so to View Folder contents use Command Prompt & type;
Show Hidden & Protected System Files
>cacls "C :\System Volume Information" /E /G user :F
where  user is account username.
(include Quotes)
---------------------
Edit Forgot to add Show.......   thanks.

Message Edited by gryjhnhpe on 01-02-2004 08:55 AM

JRosenfeld · Answer

How to ghain access to system volume information in Windows Explorer: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;309531&Product=winxp

kboy24 · Answer

I'd like to add an update. System Restore is turned off, it's a tiny bit, less than a gig, not a big worry. Also, tried running regular disk clean up, freezes or takes a load of time on the "Compress old files" step. Considering how late it is, I'm going to set it to run and just let the computer go while I sleep, so how well that works.

Another thing that's kind of interesting is that norton utility I talked about works fine for DVDs, but when using the HD appears to cause a crash in ntdll.dll. I'm almost wondering if it's ANOTHER buffer problem, where I simply have too many files, and it doesn't allocate enough space or something. Anyone else seen anything like that?

gryjhnhpe · Answer

If you don't want to 'Compress old files' anymore you can Delete HKEY which will speed up opening of 'Disk Cleanup' windows.  (no Compressed files to scan).    Use Regedit & navigate to HKEY   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Compress old files         ,  right click & Export if you later want to add HKEY back or just right click & Delete.

Windows General

Problems with HD space usage, and Recovery Console

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