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Can't figure out what is using the 16.5 gig. This drive has never been a system drive - its an external usb hard drive.

Nothing in disk cleanup of any use:

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I also tried everything in the More Options tab there, and also Check disk, and defragger did nothing.

This is the only partition on the disk - a basic partition.

This is all that shows in explorer: with show hidden, and show system files turned on

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I'm confident the drive wouldn't have come out of the factory with 16.5 gig mysteriously used up. Note that this drive was full of files - hundreds of thousands of them - and had been being used consistently without a format for at least 5 years (I've just deleted all the files now). I will try a format soon, but just curious if anyone had an answer as I have another drive with similar problems that I would prefer not to format. Thanks!

Edit: Opening the volume in 7zip reviled more info, but still doesn't account for 16 gig.

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I have now formatted the drive, and that did give me the 16 gig back. As mentioned though, still have another drive with the same problem that I don't want to format, so still looking for a solution to this :)

Edit 2: Ugh, so I was able to fix the problem on my other drive by deleting the $RecycleBin folder. When I ran WinDirStat on that drive in admin mode I could see that the $RecycleBin folder had 34 gig in it, even though this is not shown in explorer, or the cleandisk utility... Unfortunately I formatted the original drive I was talking about in this question, so am unable to test if that was the problem there. However the screenshot of 7Zip above WAS run in admin mode, on the original drive, and that shows nothing in the $RecyclingBin folder? I don't have any drives left with anything in the recycling folder with which to test whether admin mode 7zip shows that data.. if anyone else does that would be good.

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  • I assume the reason cleandisk utility wasn't showing / allowing me to clear everything in the $RecyclingBin folder was because some of the recycled data was recycled when the drive was plugged into a different computer?
    – matt
    Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 4:58
  • Your missing 16GB could be the space pre-empted by Recycle Bin, as it is calculated at a certain percentage of the total available space. Right-click on the (hidden) Recycle Bin icon and see in its properties how much space is devoted to your Trash by default on this drive. You can lower it as much as you want to gain free space, since you'll be able to permanently delete items bigger than the Recycle Bin capacity anyway. However, there'll be no (easy) way to salvage the deleted data afterwards.
    – user1019780
    Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 7:38

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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It could be that system restore is enabled for this drive. Open a command prompt as administrator and run the following command. If so, you can disable it in "Create a restore point" (search the start menu for this)

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Another thing you could do is run the "Scanner" utility from http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/ as admin and have it scan that drive to report what is using the space.

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    Thanks for the help, in this case this didn't help me, but could very well help others. I like WinDirStat for a directory break down. (this also didnt find anything in my case though)
    – matt
    Commented Apr 16, 2020 at 4:09

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