I have an 8 TB hard drive in my Windows 10 Pro machine (3 years old). It has always reported 7.27 TB, which is normal.
Last I checked (a couple weeks ago) the drive was just over half full. Today I checked and Windows Explorer shows my data drive as 20.3 GB free of 7.27TB
So I ran WinDirStat to figure out where all the space is going, and it finds 4.1 TB of files on the drive, which is confusing.
What I have tried.
- I do not have system restore turned on, but I deleted system restore and shadow copies anyway
- I ran
dism /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanupper ChatGPT’s suggestion - I set chkdsk to run during the next restart and restarted
- I looked at the pagefile is some 5GB. Hibernation is disabled.
- I checked the recycle bin, and there was a few GB there. I emptied the recyle bin.
- I deleted a few folders I don’t need anymore
The drive now reports 69.3 GB free of 7.27TB; still 3 TB of unaccounted for space.
What else can I try to determine where the rest of the space is going and recover that available space?
