where's my hard drive being used????

[lilticus]

i have just got a 2nd hand laptop and i have deleted everything i can find on it that was from previous users but i have still only got 10 gb free, that means that there is 50gb being used somewhere and for the life of me i cant find it. i have gone through the hard drive all afternoon and deleted loads of stuff, removed loads of programs and then run a file shred program. is it possible that there are other users and files somewhere , it was previously owned by a family and i know the kids used it but i cant find any user info for them, is there a way to just wipe the HD just leaving the OS or retrurning to the factory settings like on a apple computer.
thanks lilticus
sorry if this is a dumb question but i am used to an ibook on which i could do this easily

 

[Ste]

Whats stopping you from formatting it through disk managment??

Can't just leave the OS unless you have an OS Disk.

 

[lilticus]

hey just downloaded program called treesize which told me where it was all being used , there was a music file hidden away with 35gb of music on it , couldnt find it before but it is now wiped and i have 45 gb spare space and that is more than enough for me . yeah thing is this is a acer travelmate with no cd drive at all so formating wasnt an option. anyway problem solved via cnet and treesize which i recomend highly if you want to know exactly where your HD space is being used, freeware too

 

[H4x3r]

unless its the stupid hibernation file chewing up 1gb of your 4gb's on the SSD in your Eee-PC....hahahahahah that one took me a good hour to find on a clean nlite 300mb version of windows xp....i was all scratching my head hahahahaha just a story...anyway glad you got it all sorted out.

if you have any other problems don't hesitate to ask away

 

[Albo23]

Is anyone on your Wifi?