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Shrinking HD space

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PauserBR

Programmer
Jan 25, 2007
27
BR
A cousin has a strange problem. She has a 40 Gbytes HD and Windows XP PRO. Everything was working fine until a few weeks ago, when the space in her HD began to shrink. Even without recording anything on it, she noticed a reduction in the available size as the days passed by. Today she has only 170 Mbytes of space available and now comes the strangest part: summing up all the alocated HD space, she has used only 7 Gbytes. But instead of having available 33 Gbytes (40-7), she has only 170 Mbytes. I have already checked the HD and it is working properly. SMART does not report any problem and it also passes thru the regular Windows check.
I tried with ZTreeWin and got the same information: used space of 7 Gbytes, HD size of 40 Gbytes and available space of 170 Mbytes.
Any hint?

 
Have you checked for virus / spyware? Sounds fishy to me!

CCNA, CCDP, Net+, A+
Work Smarter, Not Harder....
This was supposed to be the future.....Where is my JetPack?!
 
Answering CorruptedLogic:
Yes, I have checked for virus and spywares. Apparently, everything is ok in this area.
Answering Wolluf:
Yes, before the shrinkage began, her hd used space was 7 GB. The fact is that even today, according to ZTreeWin, the used space still is 7 GB. The huge change is in the "available bytes". Classifying all the files in the HD, the biggest one is pagefile.sys, but it has less than one GB. I´ll try tomorrow the link you suggested.
I thank both, CorruptedLogic and Wolluf for all the help and suggestions.
 
Try running ChkDsk to check your drive for errors. Right-click your Drive icon/ Properties/ Tools/ Error Checking. Select both boxes.

What anti virus software, or security software are you running, perhaps it has gone amok and is creating thousands of temp files or cache files or similar?

Running the Disk Cleanup tool may help.

Downloading tools like Process Explorer or FileMon from -
Sysinternals Utilities: File & Disk, might help.


Look at some of these threads too.

Missing HD space?!?!
Thread779-384155

something is cosuming the hard drive freespace
thread779-810374

Delete Offline Flies
thread779-816712

316505 - Windows XP Does Not Recognize All Available Disk Space

How to Locate and Correct Disk Space Problems on NTFS Volumes in Windows XP(Q315668)

The Default Cluster Size for the NTFS and FAT File Systems(Q314878)

Hard Drive Space Monster
thread779-832784
 
I tried DiskData and it does not seem to see the real problem. After deleting sound and video files, that is the situation reported by DiskData:
Actual Size: 7.943.400KB, Allocated size: 8.005.360KB.
Going to Summary, it reports:
Total Space: 39.070.048KB, Used Space: 38.537.324KB, Free Space: 532.724KB.
Where is the difference of 30.531.964KB [39.070.048KB-8.005.360KB-532.724KB)?

 
Are you showing Hidden and System files in Folder Options/ View?

Did you try ChkDsk /r? This will possibly correct the free space details if it is in error.

HOW TO: Install and Use the Recovery Console for Windows XP (Q307654)


You could try looking at the hard drive from something like BartePE, (a mini XP self contained on a bootable CD and run from CD).

 
DiskMaintenance is a little suite of progs for end users at
It includes detritus.exe, a program that lists and totals the sizes of the various temp files, caches, et cetera that are very likely useless and that MS Disk Cleanup misses.

It usually finds things that are chewing up space.
 
strella,

By default Disk Cleanup does not touch any files that are less than a week old. This setting can be changed to increase the cleanup coverage.

310312 - Description of the Disk Cleanup Tool in Windows XP


Disk Cleanup uses the the following Registry Key in determining which location it will delete temporary files from.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Temporary Files

It uses the following Value in the above key to determine how old those files must be before it will delete them.

"LastAccess". The Default value is 7 days.



Disk Cleanup (and other programs) also use the Environmental Variables to determine the location of the TEMP folder it will delete the files from. The Default folder is -

User Variables for usernamexxxx
%USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp

The above lists user environment variables (such as a path where files are located) that are defined by you or by programs.


The alternative location if the "User Variables for usernamexxxx" are removed is -

System Variables.
%SystemRoot%\TEMP

This lists system environment variables defined by Windows, which are the same no matter who is logged on to the computer.


You must be logged on as a member of the Administrators group to change values or add new variables.



My conclusion therefore is that in order to delete everyones temp files (in one action) you must select the "System Variables" and remove every "User Variables for usernamexxxx" (that apply to %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp) in the Environmental Variables, thus forcing users to store their .temp (or .tmp) files in %SystemRoot%\TEMP rather than %USERPROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp.

Further, to delete files less than a week old you must remove or edit the "LastAccess" value of the above Registry Key.
 
Thank you Strella and Linney for the material above. As I told before, this computer belongs to a cousin. I intend to visit her in the next few days and I´ll apply your advices to try solving her problem. I´ll keep you informed.
I´ll also try booting her micro with UBUNTU, a Linux distribution that boots from a CD and sees any NTFS partition.
 
A few other areas to look at due to XP's default settings:

1) System Restore is assigned 10% of the HD size. If everything is working fine then clean out the stored System Restore files by turning System Restore off and applying the change. Next, turn it back on again and reduce the amount of assigned HD space to something more sensible, e.g. 100Mb on a 40Gb drive.

2) Recycle Bin is assigned 10% of the HD size. Clear out the Recycle Bin then reduce the amount assigned to something more sensible, e.g. 200Mb on a 40Gb drive.

3) The Temporary Internet Files cache is set to 10% of the HD size for every user account. Clean out the TIF cache for each user then reduce the amount assigned to something more sensible. I use 10Mb max for each user account, irrespective of the size of the HD 'cos files stored in the TIF cache are usually very small and a build-up of these can lead to un-necessary fragmentation of the hard disk and, depending on the size of each cluster, can gobble HD space alarmingly.

Note that I've found that some Critical Updates have restored the default settings so always check after 'Patch Tuesday.

Hope this helps...

 

On a customer's PC I once had the same problem.

It turned out to be DrWatson writing a huge log file. The firewall was causing errors and DrWatson kept logging.
Look for a file named "drwatson.log" or similar.

TomCologne
 
Sorry, Tom, but unless drwatson.log is completely invisible to any OS (I also tried with a Linux boot disk), that´s not the explanation. My cousin wants to reformat the HD, but I´m trying to convince her to wait a few more days. I would really appreciate to learn what is happening. Now she has only 90 kbytes free and her micro is virtually impossible to use.
 
None of us will learn the reason if the Format is done, but we must respect your cousins decision, she probably needs a working machine more than we need to know the solution.
 
There is a freeware named Treesize Using it I found on one computer where the free space was gone in similar situation. There was illegal ftp server, created using some trojan horse (there was no firewall enabled on that PC). The files were good hidden and it was not easy to delete them because of some invalid characters in folder names.

===
Karlis
ECDL; MCSA
 

Actually, the file name of DrWatson's log is "drwtsn32.log".

TomCologne
 
Hey I ran into this same problem last night...
My free space was shrinking fast...I couldn't figure out why.
turned a 150 gig HD into a 30 gig....only had about 800 mb free...

Anyway I opened partion magic and could finally see that the space was still there but had become unpartioned...odd..

Anyway I just turned the unpartioned space back into free space and that seems to have fixed it...I ran a few virus scans and found nothing...I'll wait to see if it happens again

I recently installed a free mpeg2 decoder and also installed and ran dna migrator on my machine before this happend...although I don't see how that would be the cause.
 
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