Windows 10: No Hardrive Dell Inspiron 5785

Ive deleted a mountain of stuff yestreday and this is the drive now. Still red yet there is not a lot on this laptop. I will run the proggram below today and see what that says.. thanks *Smile

 

I suspect you are going to find a few really big system files that are taking up a lot of space.
A Terabyte (1000GB) of data is A LOT of data. A user could only accomplish that by saving hundreds of 1GB movies or millions of 5MB photos.

 

Deleted quite a bit more today . This is what I have for now.. you will probably see something i dont...

 

right click on C:\ > select Properties > select Disk Clean Up > when that windows pops-up
select Clean up System files

Check mark every box and click OK

 

Never Mind - it is all your system back-ups that are taking up all that space...

You only need to keep a few of the most recent back-ups
Unless you want to restore your PC back to a few months/years ago

It appears you also have made backups of your backup images..
due to the file size from one day to the next..

You should never SAVE backup images on your primary Harddrive..
if Hard drive fails - the backup fails along with it..

Always _ Use external Media for backup images

Your backup folder is using 725GB

 

Morning . Left plug in all night without battery . Started no problems this morning . So new battery ?
If the plug is in though wouldn't it start without battery or not as power is on ? Thanks , feeling Im getting there ,,

 

Yes, you are correct. Any laptop will start and run without the battery just fine. But that was not the purpose of the test.

What we discovered is that the problem seems to be isolated to the battery. The battery is not holding a charge, and the PC is acting strange when it is only on the battery.
So yes, I think we have justified the cost of a new battery.

If the symptoms you were having were due to the hard drive being full you would see these when starting up without the battery.

The advice above about cleaning up your backups is a good one.
Just by doing that you should reclaim about 50% or more of your hard drive real estate. You only need to keep the most recent backup.

 

Quick opinion on PC backups:

I keep my disk image backups in 2 places. One is in a special partition on my PC hard drive(s), and a copy is on an external drive.
The reason for this strategy is that there are 2 major reasons why you need to use a backup image.

The first is when your PC is infected by a virus, malware, or user error. In these cases the PC runs fine, just your files are trashed. Restoring a backup directly from the PC in these cases just goes faster.

The second is a hard drive failure or ransomware attack. In these cases you can't access any files on the PC and you can't run backup software normally. In these cases you must have a backup image on an external drive, a way to load the backup software from a boot drive device, and the knowledge of how to do this.

I would guess that kittenwoman has a program on her laptop that is doing backups automatically (and seemingly without your knowledge). This can be better than nothing since so many folks can never find the time to do this chore. But it would be a fine strategy to just copy the most recent backup file to an external drive from time to time and delete all older backup files on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis - whatever works for you. The more frequent the better of course.

 

Strange , I logged off last night with plug. forgot about battery being out. Logged on this morning, put battery in and it was still full , weird as if its put off with it in its drained. Have been searching to day for a new battery *Smile

 

Ran tree again today after disk clean up and looks like its all back again *Sad I must be doing something wrong . what do you think ? Ta

 

Can you look on your hard disk (Windows Explorer File Manager) and see if there is a folder named "Backups"?
Can you tell us what is in that folder (if you find it)?

When you say "it is all back again", does that mean that you ran Treesize one time and it (The large backup folder) was all gone?

 

Run this see if it tells us whats doing this
Please download and save FRST 64bit or FRST 32 bit to your Desktop.

http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/farbar/FRST.exe
http://download.bleepingcomputer.com/farbar/FRST64.exe

Right click to run as administrator (XP users click run after receipt of Windows Security Warning - Open File). When the tool opens click Yes to disclaimer.
Make sure that Addition option is checked.
Press Scan button.
It will produce a log called FRST.txt in the same directory the tool is run from.
Please copy and paste log back here.
The first time the tool is run it generates another log (Addition.txt - also located in the same directory as FRST.exe/FRST64.exe). Please also paste that along with the FRST.txt into your reply.

 

This is what I have left now. I cant see a backup folder on hard disk . I will run what you suggest today and paste it back here..thanks

 

Lets try these 2 things if you could:

Post a screen shot of your C: drive
Click on the folder icon (Windows Explorer) to the left of the Task Bar > in the window that opens up, click to highlight Local Disk C: on the left > and screenshoot everything you see there.

Post a screen shot of Disk Management
Start > Windows Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Storage: Disk Management
(If no Administrative Tools then just search for Computer Management)
Expand the window so you can see everything (all columns and rows)
Then screenshoot that.

Let's see what we can see.