Storage forum: Help! Hard-drive space doing the disappearing and reappearing act!

There are programs that let you look at what folders & files are taking up the used space on your hard drive. You need to run one of those while the disk is showing "almost full" and see where the space is going. One that I sometimes use is "Treesize" from JAM software. There is a free version and a "professional" version, for your purposes, the free version is probably all that you need. You can find it at http://www.jam-software.com/freeware/index.shtml. Once you know where your space is going, the rest of this is straightforward.

Great suggestion BradJohnson2, but I want to let our readers know that this utility ExplorerXP is only for Windows XP or 2000.

Lorilou, states that she has Vista so it may not work for her.

Cheers!
-Lee

go to gohacking.comor any virus sites which and for methods to know if there is a virus on you sys which is possibly filling the space with "garbage"(it is a technical term pls dont mistake me)also check your sys for unusual dll's and tak manager for processes oter than for what shuld be present

Make sure your hard drive data cable is not crumpled, mangled. or folded with sharp creases. Better yet, just replace the data cable. Also check or replace your CMOS battery.

Greetings. I'd like to dream that I'd be some PC Guru but I'm afraid that once I settle into the dream, the alarm will sound to wake me.

I have experienced this exact thing, but only in the form of a subscription p2p software entity called Bearshare. I noticed within the past couple of months that once I tried to update the software due to a new version prompt, my harddrive space became burried, leaving me with 200MB of free space. (Its a Compaq Presario with an 80GB Hard Drive) At that time, I aborted the update and was really confused as to how and why I was losing free space. Just yesterday, (10/1/2009) I attempted the update with the same result. This time I reflected on the last update and was starting to make a connection.

The subscription music downloads that were obtained by this program (Bearshare) were saved to an external harddrive. Yet, somehow, the program referenced everything still within the program even though the external harddrive was not connected. So, after the update for Bearshare completed and confirmed all of my space on the harddrive taken up... all but 200MB, I simply CRTL+A to highlight all of the referenced downloaded music and then deleted them. All of the freespace returned.

I'm not certain that this will help. This is just my experience and if there are any types of programs that are used to interface with file types and those types are stored to an external drive, you may consider doing what I did regarding my experience.

The computer I'm using (0ne of them) that has experienced this issue is running Windows XP Home Edition. 2.4GHz Celeron Processor and 512MB of RAM. (Hey... don't make fun... I'm also using a 466MHZ eMachines with approx 300MB of RAM and a 4GB Harddrive. Its running Windows XP Pro and uses Google Chrome and Winamp. It was actually the first computer I sold 10 yrs ago when I worked for a local PC place.)

I hope this is good info... if not, perhaps mildly entertaining???

This is a known forum bug that is affecting some of our forums users. I will have an engineer look into this and hopefully get this problem corrected shortly. We do apologize for the confusion and inconvenience.

Best regards,
-Lee

Hi Lorilou,

That is rather strange behaviour. Obviously something fairly significant is going on, so you may want to try one of the disk space analysers - check CNET Downloads or Google for them. If possible, get one that will order the results report by file size, so you can look at the biggest first and compare the report from the disk when it's reporting full and one if it cleans itself up again.

A few ideas you might want to check.

System Restore has a bit of a reputation for gobbling up disk space and for some reason, seems to affect Vista more than XP (don't know why - I don't use Vista). But you can set a limit on how much storage System Restore can use before it goes into an automatic clean up, which deletes the oldest copies. On XP (and there is an equivalent for Vista - perhaps another member will elucidate) you get to the controls via Start - Settings - Control Panel - System - System Restore tab. There, you will see a slider that limits the amount of disk space System Restore can use. It will probably be set to maximum. Try moving the slider back to about half way and see if that increases the pool of disk space available. You can manually clean up the System Restore space by turning System Restore off and on again but it you try this do make sure you take a new Restore point when you turn it back on again to be sure you have one in case disaster happens!

Next, if you run an application, particularly video editing, that uses a lot of memory, it can increase the amount of virtual storage (pagefile.sys on the hard disk root usually) and this will hang around until you next reboot the system. There are tools that can clean this up in flight, though that said, 120 GB would be very excessive.

You've cleaned your caches - that's good. Depending what email client you use, you may need to do a similar job on your email files. I use Thunderbird and am fairly rigorous in deleting messages I'm finished with. The messages then go into the Trash or Deleted folder, depending which version is being used. Under the File menu is a command to Empty Trash / Deleted and sure enough, the messages are deleted from the Trash / Deleted folder list. But they aren't gone! They are not easily accessible but they are still sitting there until you run the other command under the file menu "Compact Folders" - then they are gone.

I also use Kaspersky Security Suite and it puts a load of very small .TMP files in my Windows\Temp folder. You might expect disk clean up to get rid of them but it doesn't. I manually delete the contents of my Windows\Temp folder periodically - there will be 2 or 3 that won't delete because they are in use but the vast majority (and I've had hundreds) will disappear.

Good Luck!

Great stuff, I've not heard most of this. Especially "Compact Folders"I use Vista mostly with Firefox & as little Int. explorer as possible through a cable provider. I have searched for every delete & empty trash command but can't find anything like "Compact Folders"? Can you help?
Thanks

As always when deleting files and other data from a hard rive, you are only taking one bit out of the data so that it is not seen as data as such. It is still on the hard drive and still takes up space.
Make sure you empty your recycle bin to make sure everything is gone. After deleting data, you should defrag the hard drive to make sure everything is gone(overwritten or just plain erased. The defragging also will put all your ducks in a row(ie place your files and other data in a contiguous line. This will also speed up data retrieval and make the programs running from the hard drive run better.

for sure, vista aint all that crab,so either some rootkit is slashing away gigs or the HD is failing, like i said rather just replace the HD windows 7 beta is free until march 2010, but yeah there's always a bunch of drama queens,system restore uses 15% of your HD rather far fetch i reckon

I use Microsoft's OneCare on my laptop. At home I have USB drives, that OneCare Points to for backups. When I travel I leave the USB drives at home, this makes OneCare very objectionable until I return home. I had the same symptoms disk full errors until OneCare finished it's backup routine. After the backup was complete the USB drive was back to normal.

The fact that it's disappearing, and then reappearing makes me think that it is a swap file. Check and see what programs you've run or are running when this happens. Then try rebooting and checking it then. Also check what programs load on start up, and disabling them to save on memory load. Also check the usual ie: virus, malware, spyware. Just a few things to check out. If all else fails a stick of dynomite, and full coverage insurance works wonders. j/k of course.

Are you using Norton by chance? I have a friend who has a laptop with XP and Norton 360. It was doing the same thing. I discovered that one of the features of Norton 360 is a backup utility. The setting was on Automatic. He was not using an external drive, so the only place that Norton could store the backup files was on the hard drive. So he had his regular stuff plus an ever-increasing set of backup files filling up the hard drive. Just a guess because I don't know what you are running.

I have been using Norton's when it first came out. The first norton's product I used was Norton System works then after that I upgraded to Norton 360 which is all in one software It works good it does not use too much of your hard drive if you know how to use it correctly and you have a good utilities program such as Tuneuputilities 2009.

Totally agree with you regarding Norton being rubbish. The amount of PC's I've repaired that have been going really slow, just for one reason, Norton, and then to make it worse Norton most of the time wont even remove itself with the uninstall program, you need to get their "Norton Removal Tool" to get rid of it.

Years ago I used to like Norton as it was really good (we're going back to MS-DOS days when Peter Norton actually had some say in the program), now with Symantec at the wheel they don't seem as bothered about how much bloatware is included in the program and whether or not you can remove it or not, it's better for them if you can't 'cos then people are more likely to renew than uninstall, especially as they work out deals with laptop manufacturers to ensure their program is installed with every new laptop sold (always thought Microsoft got done for including Internet Explorer with Windows, why is Norton then allowed to include Norton Anti-virus with most laptops, and make it nearly impossible to remove, without the Norton Removal Tool).

I use ESET's Smart Security and that provides me just as much protection as Norton without the bloated extra features that I don't want or am probably never going to need, and when I uninstall it, it does exactly that.

The only time I was thankful to Norton was when my friend got Chernobyl virus on his computer (we're going back to the days of Window 98 here!) and McAfee kept removing it from his system and it kept re-installing it, Norton found it on one file that McAfee wasn't checking, there was a genuine reason why McAfee wasn't checking it but considering how bad the Chernobyl virus was to computers it was stupid to not even warn me it was in this file as it would have saved me a lot of messing around and re-scanning with McAfee over and over again to try and remove it. The file was command.com, probably the most important system file in earlier versions of Windows and MS-DOS. When I found that out all I did was boot off a floppy disk that was created on another computer, and copy command.com over, which without Norton I would never have found that virus with McAfee. But unfortunately Norton has gone down hill a lot since then.