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?
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