this reader voted recently saying he was looking for more harddrive space and he
found these hidden partitions and windows and he wanted to know if he
could use them we looked at it and we said good find but you need to be
careful while you're in there I'll show you why
windows does take some of your harddrive space to store files that it needs to
keep your system running we're talking boot file system recovery files all
important things so I'll show you what it looks like in there and why you need
to be a little careful first we're going to look at what Windows 10 can tell me
about these partitions I'm going to right click on the start button scroll
up to disk management and then this window pops up that shows me a list of
all the partitions on my hard drive but look at what it's showing me under
capacity vs. free space I've got this one point four six gigabyte partition
and I've got one point four six gigabytes of free space the next one 450
megabytes of capacity 450 megabytes of free space awesome nine and a half gigs
of capacity nine and a half gigs of free space at this point you're thinking I've
got all this space I can use but things are not as they seem if I really want to
see what's going on in my hard drive I'm going to need a more sophisticated tool
so I downloaded a third-party disk utility called eases partition master
let's see what it has to say about my partitions so first I'm going to snap
this window to the right and then I'm going to fire up easiest partition
master so here you see this user account control box
that's because partition master is a partition utility and it can mess with
your hard drive so it's asking for permission to do that and you're going
to click yes and then the application will launch
and here we are in the partition master interface which I'm going to snap to the
right so now we see here the same partitions showing in the disk
management interface and in the partition master interface and as you
look more closely you can see the information is very different where Disk
Management said that this one point four six gigabyte partition was totally free
in partition master it says that a half a gigabyte is used and you only have one
gigabyte that's unused if you right-click on that partition and hit
Explorer you can see more of what's going on in there suddenly you can see
all the folders in the partition and they have names that should definitely
make you pause booth recovery system volume information this is not just some
random game you downloaded from the internet these are important files for
your computer and you should not mess with this folder let's look at another
partition there's this 9.5 gigabyte one over here that disk management said was
totally free look at it over in a partition master 8.8 gigabytes of it is
already used you've only got this little bit left let's find out why you
right-click it you hit Explorer well looky here hard drive recovery well you
don't want to mess with this stuff you have the recycle bin some boot files
some system volume information once again partition master has confirmed
that these are folders you do not want to mess with if this has been an older
Windows PC I might have actually had some extra space in these hidden
partitions because once you install and uninstall a lot of programs or
especially if you install and uninstall old versions of Windows there will be
folders left behind that the new version doesn't need anymore that you could
repurpose but in the case of my new system there wasn't anything I could use
in there and thank goodness partition master told me that because disk
management sure didn't if you have any other questions about Windows 10 you can
always email us answer at PCWorld calm