I have a Windows 10 desktop with a 1 TB drive that I use for my OS partition plus one other 500 MB partition (mounted as E:) that almost exclusively has junction links to folders on my other drives (these junctions do exist in directories created "locally" on the E:\ drive).
I have a program that automatically puts these junction links on the E:\ drive and this program recently started failing because it says it does not have sufficient space to create the local directories where the junctions will go.
When I look at the space usage with TreeSize Free (run as administrator to explore all folders), it says I am using 18.7 MB of space (this is almost entirely due to shortcut .lnk files I created on this "drive"). When I right-click on the E:\ drive in Windows Explorer and select "Properties" it says that I am using up 499 MB of space and only have 4 KB free (which I assume is correct due to the fact that I get an insufficient space error when I try to create a new directory here). Is all this space being used up in the file system table?
My Question: How can I examine where/how this half a gigabyte is being used?
I am on Windows 10 so I believe system restore is off by default but just to double check, I took ownership and gave myself permissions to look in "E:\system volume information" to make sure nothing was in there (and there was only 20 KB of files in that folder). Similarly I emptied the recycle bin just in case there was space being used there.
chkdsk gives the following output:
E:\>chkdsk E:
The type of the file system is NTFS.
Volume label is SsdLinkPoint.
WARNING! /F parameter not specified.
Running CHKDSK in read-only mode.
Stage 1: Examining basic file system structure ...
272640 file records processed.
File verification completed.
Phase duration (File record verification): 4.10 seconds.
24 large file records processed.
Phase duration (Orphan file record recovery): 0.00 milliseconds.
0 bad file records processed.
Phase duration (Bad file record checking): 0.50 milliseconds.
Stage 2: Examining file name linkage ...
262396 reparse records processed.
288946 index entries processed.
Index verification completed.
Phase duration (Index verification): 3.38 seconds.
0 unindexed files scanned.
Phase duration (Orphan reconnection): 118.09 milliseconds.
0 unindexed files recovered to lost and found.
Phase duration (Orphan recovery to lost and found): 0.43 milliseconds.
262396 reparse records processed.
Phase duration (Reparse point and Object ID verification): 958.93 milliseconds.
Stage 3: Examining security descriptors ...
Security descriptor verification completed.
Phase duration (Security descriptor verification): 11.39 milliseconds.
8153 data files processed.
Phase duration (Data attribute verification): 0.26 milliseconds.
Windows has scanned the file system and found no problems.
No further action is required.
511999 KB total disk space.
24288 KB in 264445 files.
104668 KB in 8155 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
383039 KB in use by the system.
4224 KB occupied by the log file.
4 KB available on disk.
4096 bytes in each allocation unit.
127999 total allocation units on disk.
1 allocation units available on disk.
Total duration: 8.58 seconds (8587 ms).
So it looks like the bulk of the space is being use by "the system". Can I drill into that any further to determine how it is being used?
