Windows XP forum: Recurring Low Disk Space Issue in Windows XP SP3

Having 3.5 gigs of free space may not be enough. Default for your recycle bin is 10% of your drive, and I cant recall the amount of disk space system restore needs but its quite a bit also, then windows needs even more free space just for moving files around while you use windows.
This tweak guide can explain, and help you try to free up more disk space, if in fact this is what your problem is.

http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html
See the cleaning windows section...

While XP will install perfectly well on a 10GB partition you will always have to 'manage' the disk space used on that partition.

This doesn't help you now of course, but often users are advised to create partitions for the OS, Programs, Data, (such as photos, music, videos), etc, but really, there is little to be gained. File or program access time is not faster with partitions because the disk head still has the same disk to seek data and read/write. There is no added security, because if the disk fails, then you lose everything anyway, and any virus or other malware that can infect one partition can, and normally will, infect the others.

What partitions do cause are space restrictions, and this is what you are experiencing now. The same differentiation of data can be just as easily achieved with separate folders and with those, there is no limit to content other than the overall disk size.

So, what to do now?

1] The easiest as far as disk management is concerned, is to start again and re-install XP, and use the XP Install disk to delete all the partitions and reformat to just the one partition to NTFS file system. Possibly not the preferred option though.

2] Manage that C drive as best you can. Remove all unwanted programs/software using the Add/Remove option in the Control Panel, or the software's own Uninstall option. Keep a close eye as you are doing now, on the system components that take up space, like System Restore, Temp files, logs, etc

3] Purchase a new internal hard disk, they are cheap now and come with large capacity, 200GB, 300GB, 500GB and so on, install it as the master and have the other as a slave, install XP on there and restart loading your software. The XP on the slave will not work, but it can be used as addition storage.

Sorry. I'm sure that this is not exactly what you wanted.

Mark

http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=gen&message.id=37951

It discusses the tvDebug.log and other logs held in C:\Windows\Internet Logs.

You can delete those through ZoneAlarm itself. Just open the ZA Control Center up from the System Tray icon, goto;
Alerts & Logs > Main > Advanced and then the Log Control tab.

Mark

I, too, had the problem with the size of my main drive reducing - in my case all the way down to zero from over 6GB! Every time I hit Refresh (F5) in Windows Explorer or Drive/Disk Management it seemed that the free space was reducing at quite an alarming rate.

After reading your post I looked for the Trace.log file and found quite a large difference (6GB) in the size it actually was compared to the size it was taking on the disk.

Windows wouldn't let me delete the file at first, saying that it was being used by another program. However, after running BootVis again (which resulted in an error message showing, though I can't remember what it said), I was then able to delete the Trace.log file.

I've now uninstalled BootVis, which was recommended by PC Utilities magazine for monitoring program startup times.

Thanks very much for your help!

I will keep those in mind and find out what is the least painful way to upgrade my HDD to a larger one.

I may end up re-installing the OS and all the software currently installed on my system. I so desperately want to avoid that

Hello all, for other users searching forums for this same issue, there is another solution... It's to disable windows indexing/seaching! The index and CiFiles and windows.edb can become enormous files.

My specifics: WinXP Pro SP3 on a Dell PC with >2GB RAM and a 75GB HD. Low disk space error recurring. I'd run disk cleanup and free a gig of space then it would disappear before my eyes each time I refreshed My Computer. Transfered non-critical files to external HD to free up another few gigs of space, only to watch that melt away too... all the while my processor was crunching away non-stop even after a fresh reboot and nothing running. This had been going on for days! I checked for viruses (AVG and malwarebytes) and found nothing. After a helpful post on a Kaspersky forum I installed WinDirStat to find where all these files had sprouted up. http://windirstat.info/. Neat little program.

So I found that far and away there were about 19GB in the CiFiles and the windows.edb was almost a gig. After doing some more research I discovered that Indexing is not necessary if you don't use the Win search function frequently so I followed the very simple instructions on found on countless pages on how to disable it. Did that and rebooted, expecting the CIfiles and edb to be gone, but still nothing. Tried to delete them myself but they were apparently "in use". So rebooted into safe mode and renamed the edb file and the CiFiles directory (was too chicken to delete them just in case). Rebooted and voila, 21GB magically appeared and those renamed files were simply gone. And according to the experts my computer will run much faster now that it's not being slowed down by constantly writing to the index.

So how did this happen in the first place? I mean I've been using this computer the same way for a few years with no issues and hadn't ever touched the indexing settings. Here's what happened. I plugged in a terabyte external hard drive (already half-full with files from my lab-mates' computers) to do a backup. Apparently this drive was set to be indexed (right-click the drive in My Computer, select properties and you'll see the pie-chart showing drive space and near the bottom is the little check-box that was checked). So My poor tiny little HD was creating a gigantic set of index files for this humongous external HD. Phew!

Anyway I hope this helps someone out there. All the things I mentioned doing are easily google-able and easily done by novices so long as you have admin access (I didn't want to risk making any mistakes in the instructions so I'll leave it to you to google the how-to's for your OS).
Cheers
S