Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows

Posted by: wfaulk

Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 07/11/2007 20:42

I have a user whose hard drive is nearing full. As a temporary measure, I had him download Scanner to see if he could find something big to delete. But when he ran it, it claimed that only about half his disk space was used. I'm disinclined to believe that there's a huge bug in Scanner, but, rather, that there is some directory somewhere that is inaccessible to the user account that the program is being run as.

Does anyone know of a utility that would help me find where that directory or those directories might be?
Posted by: gbeer

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 01:33

Last time I had something like that happen. Someone (an admin) had deleted a pot full of stuff into the trash and didn't empty it.

None of the typical end user tools would show those deleted files.
Posted by: Roger

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 07:32

Quote:
but, rather, that there is some directory somewhere that is inaccessible to the user account that the program is being run as.

Does anyone know of a utility that would help me find where that directory or those directories might be?


Yeah, Scanner, but run from an account with the necessary mojo.
Posted by: g_attrill

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 10:09

WinDirStat is very good too, I use it all the time to track down those large files one forgets about.
Posted by: Cybjorg

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 13:38

I like JDiskReport.
Posted by: wfaulk

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 14:37

Quote:
Yeah, Scanner, but run from an account with the necessary mojo.

That's not really true. Scanner isn't going to show me which files are inaccessible, it's just going to include the formerly inaccessible files. If it's all in one big directory, it might be obvious which it is, though. In addition, the user is already an Administrator on the computer.

As it turns out, though, the computer had IBM's Rescue and Recovery program installed and scheduled to perform regular backups of his hard drive onto his hard drive. Which explains why it was almost exactly half. In addition, the directory somehow had had its permissions removed. And, by that, I don't mean that all of the permissions entries were removed, I mean that the GUI didn't give you the security tab at all. It was simply inaccessible. I ran the R&R configuration, deleted the 20-some GB of backups that he didn't need and turned off the schedule.
Posted by: Dignan

Re: Finding hidden disk hogs in Windows - 08/11/2007 20:23

Quote:
As it turns out, though, the computer had IBM's Rescue and Recovery program installed

D'oh! The place I worked had IBM's with all the Thinkpad software installed, and I ran into this exact same issue. Sorry it didn't jog my memory. I wonder why the backups don't show up, though.