Thanks for the good press 
I’ve asked if any other mod can help on the mods board. May take a day or two - we are all unpaid and do this in spare time!
Best wishes
Mouse
I’m reading and pondering your topic but I can’t make sense of what has happened.
The following is just thinking out loud to make sure I’m not missing anything.
CTM writes its data into the unused sectors of the partition. Windows, to all extents and purposes does not know this data is written there as it is written by the CTM raw disk driver. When you look at the contents of a CTM protected partition, what is displayed is a mashup of what Windows wrote to the pre-CTM sector map and what CTM has written to the unused sectors on the partition.
For example;
STEP 1
If you had a 20GB NTFS HDD with 10GB of data on it you would have 10GB used and 10GB unused.
STEP 2
If you then you installed CTM and, after installing CTM, wrote 5GB of data, you would have 15GB used and 5GB unused. The orignal 10GB from step 1 is still in the same location and the 5GB copied after installing CTM is written to the unused part of the disk (the 10GB unused space from step 1). The CTM driver is what mashes the “real” files and the CTM files together to display a cohesive disk listing.
STEP 3
If you then removed the 20GB HDD and installed it as a secondary drive into a PC that did not have CTM installed on it, when you looked at the contents, it would display 10GB used and 10GB unused. The CTM data is still there, but because the CTM driver isn’t available, there is no means of seeing the “missing” 5GB of data and the OS is reading the original file table (as per step 1).
STEP 4
With the CTM protected HDD installed back in the original system and rebooted, you would be back to having 15GB used and 5GB unused. If you uninstalled CTM (and in doing so reset the baseline to your latest snapshot) the 5GB of “CTM” data would be written to the real sectors and added to the real file table. You would then end up with 15GB used and 5 GB unused.
or
STEP 4A
With the CTM protected HDD installed back in the original system and rebooted, you would be back to having 15GB used and 5GB unused. If you uninstalled CTM (and in doing so reset the baseline to your original snapshot) the 5GB of “CTM” data would be deleted and you would be back to 10GB used and 10GB unused.
I would have expected your scenario to most closely mimic steps 4 or 4A.
Does everyone agree with my logic on how CTM is supposed to work?
If I’m correct, I just don’t understand how you have lost space.
Cheers,
Ewen
Out of curiousity, what was the size when CTM was installed? 35GB?
You said
7. I restored Clonezilla's image (there was CTM 2.8 and CIS 5.10) and just uninstalled CTM. Now CIS updates ok. BUT: I have C: disk of 50 GB capacity and it had never been more then 18 GB full. But now it is about 35 GB full though the total size of all files here is 14 GB.
Was your Clonezilla image a bit-for-bit full sector copy or was it a partition image?
Free space was about 35-40 GB. Really, I don’t remember. I remember that before Clonezilla I use this ducking Windows in-built system restore (Win7) and it almost doubled initial occupied size after restoration through image.
Partition image.
Hmm. Maybe format the system partition and again restore the Clonezilla’s image?
Thanx for your attention.