What is taking up this space on my SSD that was once used as a system disk and how to reclaim it?

Question

My PC came with a 1TB SSD only. (old C: drive) I had a 500GB SSD added and made that the new C: drive and made the old 1TB SSD the new D: drive

There are no files on D: drive. Yet 47GB is taken up. Presumably by old system files from it being the previous C: drive?

Do you think that's what is taking up that space? And more importantly
How can I reclaim that space?

Macrium Shows SSD Space taken up on "empty" D: Drive.

Trying to figure out what's taking the space

What Windows says is taking the space.

There are no files on D: drive. ----- Do a complete format and see if space is reclaimed that way — John, Nov 22 '22 at 02:26
Careful, it may still be the boot and recovery drive, depending on how the new drive was created as the new C:. — Moab, Nov 22 '22 at 03:29
Does this answer your question? How can I visualize the file system usage on Windows? — Ramhound, Nov 22 '22 at 05:19
@John I just formatted it after your suggestion. It's the same exact size. — Hoff, Nov 22 '22 at 05:41
Thanks @John. I guess technically it's only 5% of the disk space and won't hurt my operations any. Just kind of irritating to see a (almost) 50 GB blob just sitting there. If anyone else has an idea, I'd love to hear it. — Hoff, Nov 22 '22 at 21:18
@Ramhound thanks for the list of resources. For now I'd like to solve this without any 3rd party software, if possible. — Hoff, Nov 22 '22 at 21:20

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Nov 23 '22 at 03:17

1

Found the culprit.

I had done "Create a system image" using Windows 10 Pro. Created a system image of the C: Drive onto this D: drive. I copied that image to my external drive and deleted the image from this D: drive.

However (I'm guessing maybe because they were system-type files) it just didn't really delete it. I deleted it, emptied the trash, and restarted the PC, but it did not clear that space from the D: drive.

But then reformatting the D: drive did clear the space.

answered Nov 23 '22 at 03:17

Hoff

93

Windows was aware of hidden files, associated with the shadow volume, which is associated with creating system images with Windows 7 Backup. By deleting the image the way you did, you orphaned the information, one of the reason's I don't use the built-in software to create images of my system disks. – Ramhound Nov 23 '22 at 03:40
@Ramhound Thank you! I am learning this lesson right now. I just tried repairing from my saved Image, which I had put on a USB stick. Windows could not find it. I assume it's missing the "mediaID.bin" file. ALSO... super lame. That you cannot change the name of the folder containing the Windows Image. I had changed to WindowsImageBackup 001, 002, 003 etc. and made notes of my incremental Images. But no, to restore an image using Windows, that folder can only be called "WindowsImageBackup". So no way of keeping track of which images are which. Just dumb all around. Will stick with Macrium etc. – Hoff Nov 23 '22 at 03:57

What is taking up this space on my SSD that was once used as a system disk and how to reclaim it?

1 Answers1