WDS shows a certain item labelled “<Unknown>” and recently someone posted a comment asking for details:
i think it would be nice to put in the faq or in help or in some docs what’s in the “unknown” space
sometimes it’s an huge amount of space… like 700 or more MB … i think it could be the “system volume information” but… what mysterous things are within this space? he he he…
This mysterious item is just the difference between what Windows reports as the free space on the volume minus size of the files WDS can access. Please note the part WDS can access! This is the important point here. WDS cannot access the files under System Volume Information on all the (NTFS?) drives, so it cannot sum up the sizes of these items. And by the way, we have had reports of up to 30 GB of “<Unknown>” space.
Now what is stored in this directory? If you could gain SYSTEM access (and I will not tell you how that is possible …), you would see that the system keeps some binary log files there, but these take up only a small portion of what is stored in there. The biggest portion is usually being taken up by the System Restore Points (SRPs) you can create (or that are automatically created by software installers). The contents are a dump of the registry at the time the SRP was taken and of relevant files (usually from the system folders). I personally turned this feature of since I have a different backup strategy - however, this may not apply to everyone, so you’ll have to live with the “<Unknown>” item :mrgreen:.
There also have been reports that some third-party software stores data there, but I cannot confirm this. Also in the very unlikely case that your file system is corrupt there may be a non-zero sized “<Unknown>” item. In that latter case run a file system check and the problems should be fixed afterwards.
// Oliver
PS: If you run under a non-privileged account this could also cause a lot of files to be inaccessible and therefore to count as “<Unknown>” …
The “System Volume Information” or others forlders can be readed in admin mode by adding reading file/folders rights to the folder (in the security pannel of the property box of the folder, add all user, with read rights)
Also remembre to use scandisk to correct file system errors, it was my case for an 1Go of ^^
Well, there are other ways to read this as well without changing the security permissions on the file(s).
If you use NTFS you will rarely have problems with file system inconsistencies. This usually only happens with FAT/FAT32 and there more often on Win9x/Me than on NT/2K and so on.
Oliver
I have a 25Gb chunk of “unknown” memory which I would so dearly like to reclaim for myself. I previosuly had SRP enabled (up to a maximum of 12% of my HDD) - when I disable it the unknown area still remains. It’s a bit of a joke having a 50Gb HDD and half of it being wasted by this Windows “feature-ette” (big thanks to Mr Gates et al).
I have Lenovo recovery and restore so do not really need the Windows XP restore facility. Do I take it then that the only way I can reclaim this space is to re-format my HDD and re-install Windows XP and start all over again with SRP disabled?
I am not sure as I don’t have access to your software. But, it might have to do with this Lenovo software. I know from other backup software that they are keeping a “secure zone” which is either a special protected area on the system partition or an extra partition. In your case the first one sounds reasonable. Try to find more information about this program.
Also run
chkdsk /r /f C:(modify C: for each HDD partition on your system), in case there are file system inconsistencies.// Oliver
The lenovo software is managed in a separate 10Gb partition - nothing to do with this 25Gb unknown space.
I have tried running chkdsk and can see no other hiden partitions. Also, the results from chkdsk agree with what I’m seeing in explorer - i.e. far more disk usage than expected. I have also defragmented the hard drive to no avail. I am seriously considering running PartitionMagic on it and attempting to reclaim this space and use it as a Linux partition. I wouldn’t mind so much if it was a few hundred meg - but 25Gb?!
Fragmentation could cause such a waste only with huge cluster sizes and very many small files, so this can be ruled out.
So you ran chkdsk with the command line I suggested above to force it to check for and repair errors?!
Well, that’s basically the last idea. I have no clue then what it could be and it is hard to diagnose from remote anyway.
Sorry,
Oliver
After some investigation, it turns out that this WAS to do with the Lenovo backup facility. I was able to play a little with the facility and thus reduce this space by deleting all previous backups and creating a new one which does not include the larger, non-essential files.
Thanks for your feedback.
Alright. Great to hear that.
// Oliver
My situation regarding “unknown”:
The pagefile always is reported correctly, btw at around 300MB to 800MB.
The doesn’t always appear after running WDS.
is always exactly 3GB when it does show up.
The 3GB does not figure into actually counting the WDS reported free space with “all the rest” of the C: drive’s files (which is 40GB)
I have a 4GB HD and with this 3GB of “unkown” - by merely adding - I have 43GB, and that would be impossible.
Today I ran chkdsk from a DOS Window (OS is Windows2000Pro SP4), re-ran WDS - all on a hunch - and the 3GB extra unkown space vanishes from the WDS report.
I only run WDS as an Administrator, Hobernate is OFF, and so also just 1 partition.
A newer article which summarizes the whole procedure in three simple steps can be found HERE.
// Oliver