HELP! Something Is Eating My Hard Drive!

[Saner]

I only have 100 mbs of space left when yesterday I had 10gb!

It's only now that windows keeps telling me that there is little disc space that i realise

I've run my Kaspersky Anti virus a couple of times but no luck, any ideas?

 

[Ibanezman]

How bizarre ! Have you done a search for large files etc :S Say anything over 1gb

 

[Saner]

How do you search for large files?

I've checked to see how much space things are taking up but can't figure out where the culprit is

 

[Matta_88]

yh get rid of everything you dont recognise as windows or somehting you own through "Add Or Remove Programs" in "Control Panel",

then hit CTRL + ALT + DELETE look at "processes" see if anything dodgy is running, id suggest that first....

 

[Ibanezman]

Yeah check your processes and the usual, but it sounds like you've done that. Look for large files, go into Start > Search > All Files... Then the What size is it ? option

Specifiy a size, so at least 1000000 kb, or something like that

 

[Saner]

Done the above!

If I go into C:, select all the files (including hidden) they come to 40.7 gb and i have a 55gb hard drive.

If I go into properties of C: I says I have 5.26gb free (was reading only 128mb free a second ago..)

EDIT: Wow, never realiswed you could do that, only 2 steam files come up over that size

 

[Ibanezman]

Very odd, maybe your paging file went crazy, or you have that windows backup\restore on and that also went crazy lol

Hehe Steam is huge isn't it !

 

[Saner]

Anyone else with any ideas?i now have 0 bytes free on my hard drive

 

[ViolentJ]

I guess you never shut down? I don't think XP would allow you to boot with 0 space left, may be wrong though.

I assume you've cleared out all temporary files? search for *.tmp also check the temporary file directory.

Clear out internet temporary files (cache) - you can do this via your browser.

I don't use Windows so can't check, but if I remember correctly, there is another temp folder within Documents & Settings under your username. You might need to enable hidden files to see the folder.

Then you need to work out where all your space is going! You said you've done virus scans, what about spyware/malware?

As mentioned above - check the size of your paging file. If you never shutdown it could well have gone a bit mad, in which case a reboot should reset it.

 

[damon]

Check the size of the windows folder. You might have network caching on which can occasionally cause probs. This would only be an issue if you were on a local network though. The folder it stores files in is usually C:\Windows\CSC and its hidden by default.