Drive full after CHKDSK, but files don't add up

Question

Last week, I was preparing to make a new partition (for Ubuntu alongside my current Windows) on my laptop, but never got that far. I ran chkdsk to make sure it was safe to partition the disk. I do remember it indicating it found a lot of bad clusters (1.2 million or so, but I don't know what is common). But when I then started Windows again for the next step, it indicated my drive has only 6GB of space left.

Before this, I had used about 430GB of the 1TB drive. Now, it says it uses 940GB.

So I tried some diagnostics. I ran chkdsk again, but it found nothing this time and fixed nothing. I tried a few of these drive visualisation programs: SpaceSniffer, TreeSize and WinDirStat seem to be the most popular ones. All three give a total file size of about 430 to 440GB, depending on whether or not I ran it with administrator privileges. I also checked the folder properties for the file size on disk, to account for the overhead in the NTFS file system in case there might be a gazillion 0B files somewhere, but I found nothing there either. A shallow diagnostic of the drive via Hiren's Bootdisk said that the drive is in good shape. It's about 1 year old. It's not the pagefile or hibernate file either, since those were found among the 430GB by SpaceSniffer and the like. The Windows system restore points function is set to use 0% of the disk. I tried to remove the restore points but that didn't do anything (since it shouldn't make any).

I made two backups, one a disk image taken before the CHKDSK run (430GB, but it's in a strange proprietary format made by the Lenovo OneKey Recovery application) and one a manual copy-paste of everything in the C drive, via ctrl-A, ctrl-C (about 200GB, I suspect it didn't have the rights to copy everything, but at least all important data in there) taken after the CHKDSK run. However, I would rather not swipe the disk if it's not absolutely necessary, since that would likely take more than one night and I use the computer extensively at work. It would mean skipping a day and I only just completed my first week there. Furthermore, no recovery CD was delivered with the laptop so it's a gamble whether I could swipe the disk and restore that image without losing my Windows copy.

Do you know any way to find and recover the lost space?

Answer 1

Furthermore, no recovery CD was delivered with the laptop so it's a gamble whether I could swipe the disk and restore that image without losing my Windows copy.<===

Dell, and HP have recovery CDs for download. Maybe your manufacturer does too. (I would have preferred to have said this in a comment).

Answer 2

Many manufacturers have a hidden partition where system recovery files are stored so that you can do a factory restore without any additional recovery media. Usually, at POST, you can press a key to get into the system restore options. However, given 1.2 million bad clusters, you should order a recovery CD and buy a new hard drive. 0 bad clusters is what you want. You may even be able to get a replacement drive under warranty, as you said it's less than a year old. Send it in and, best case, they send you a laptop with a good hard drive and a clean Windows installation. Then you can add your Linux distro.

Answer 3

1. Get Diskstate or any other tool that shows your data distribution and check where the actual data that takes up your space is.

2. Clean that up.

3. Stop using CHKDSK. Use better tools staring with basic scanning ones like the scan tab of HDTune.