Plummeting Hdd Space...

Hi everyone,

I wouldn't be posting this if it doesn't get so irritating for me. :banging:

Apparently, I am running Win-XP (what else...) and am currently the server for the LAN in my flat. Used my laptop to sign up to the internet too and routing for the rest of my flatmates.

And the problem is this: I started off with still 1GB free space for me to play around with... sort of whatever that's left after installing everything I need and such. But after some very normal usage (playing mp3s, surfing the net, doing documents and PARTICIPATING IN THE ALL-TIME FAVOURITE A-S. ), my HDD space went down from 1GB, to a misery 300MB!!! :rant:

My remedy actions were as follows... I tried to run disk cleanup to free up additional space, then ran disk defragmenter (hopefully it'll work somehow...). Then I went on to reducing the disk percentage allocated to the automatic system restore feature... as well as reducing my virtual memory size. But despite all these changes, my HDD space still continues to decrease and is now only 150MB. :nuts:

Does anyone has the slightest idea why this is happening?

Oh, my system runs almost 24/7. If that helps...

(BTW, my automatic update for windows is not turned on, for reasons that it introduces more problems than correcting them.)

Hope someone can give me a reason why this is happening... And of course, if anyone can help me rectify this problem... :bow: It'll be a million thanks! :woot:

Regards,

Silencedge

PS: Another reason why my next system will be the PowerBook...

#87130

Browser Cache?

Control Panel -> Internet Options

Temporary Internet Files

Check out the Settings... and Delete Files... options.

#87137

I'm thinking either what Jef said or maybe possibly a virus...altho I don't think that's likely...

Also try disk Cleanup, and of course, check ur Trash.

#87142

@Jef: I tried what you mentioned... And I've deleted my offline pages, cleared internet history... but disk space remains at the all-time low... well, fluctuating by 1-2 MB actually. Not much of a change... any other ideas?

Very much appreciated though. Thanks Jef.

@heesey1010: Thanks for your reply as well. [see above for result] As for your guess of the presence of a virus, well I have already done a few scans in the past 2 weeks... The AV software I am using is F-Secure v5.41, registered version which I downloaded from my university website. Commercial... so I believed it to be rather competent in what it's supposed to do...

Yea, cleared my trash as well... and clean-up ran quite a few times already. [see first post].

Anyway, no results from the AV scans. I was still hoping that it's some virus at work, then at least I can do something about it. But no... no results.

Hmm... if this additional information helps... I always run OB, OD, Samurize on my desktop whenever my system starts. Oh, and Y'z toolbar as well.

Once again, thanks for the replies! :shy:

#87153

maybe it's a paging file that is changing size constantly?

#87155

Originally posted by wookietv@Dec 9 2003, 07:04 PM

maybe it's a paging file that is changing size constantly?

Is there anything which I can do about that?

Help help... :bow:

But the size of the file (if it is) seems to be getting only bigger... never decreasing...

#87157

to set a static page file size: right click my computer > advanced > performance settings > advanced > virtual memory "change" > custom size, typically people recommend between 1.5 and 2 times your ram. then set and you might need to reboot.

the page file shouldn't be increasing without bound, though. something is wrong. have you checked for viruses/spyware?

#87160

Check System Restore (Y)

#87182

Go with what paul said. Some people experience a bug with system restore which makes it swallow vast swathes of disk space. There is apparently (ironically for you as someone who doesn't run windows update) a windows update which fixes this problem. Read this in a magazine a couple of weeks ago. HTH.

#87209

here is an article explaining the paging file... and how to set it (Dreamz, you might want to take a refresher course, they're saying the multiplier by your ram is a fallicy... i thought it was usually that way also)

http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

#87210

Hi guys,

Thanks so much for all your help. :bow:

@Paul2-0-0-2: I've checked my system restore. It's supposed to use only 8% of my current drive, which is not more than 900MB. But I've lost more than 900MB now... so I'm wondering what's wrong still...

@Ludge: I've actually just disabled windows update for 2 weeks or so, so I reckon that I've not really missed much updates. Of course, I may have missed the essential ones if they are only recently updated. Well, the reason why I disabled the update was because everytime I carry out a downloaded update, I would have to reconfigure the LAN routing and internet sharing again within my flat. Giving me lots of inconvenience... Doesn't seemed to me to be making my system more workable, but the opposite effect. :cry:

@wookietv: Thanks for the article. It's quite a bit of a read. Lots of words! :smartass: But valuable information though. Shall be trying it out.

@dreamz: Thanks man. I'd be altering my virtual memory (again), but this time in accordance with the article recommended by wookietv. Shall see what happens. >.

:bow:

#87253

ahh, thanks for pointing that out, wookietv. interesting.

i always think it's better to have the size set too high than to have it set too low and suffer from crashes, but i might revise my settings to recover a few hundred mb.

silencedge, let us know what happens.

#87281

Gosh, maybe it's some hdd problem....bad sectors? Run some heavy tests on your hdd, maybe it'll explain the situation.

Just my 3,14 cents

#87285

Dear all,

Thanks for all the advices and links... Well, here's the final update... not final, but what's in so far.

I used to set my virtual memory at 1576MB (min and max).

I've changed my virtual memory size... I've scaled down my virtual memory size from 1576MB, to now 256MB (min) to 1024 (max), since I've got 384MB RAM on my system. According to that article, RAM + VM = 500MB would be ideal.

So, that should free up approximately 1GB of HD space upon reset, which it did. (Y)

HOWEVER, before I first set that high amount of VM (referring to 1576MB), I had approximately 2.4GB of free space. Which means, after that setting of 1576MB, I'm still supposed to have 1GB free. And it's this 1GB that's going lost which I am concerned about.

@Pe7er: Thanks for the suggestion. Done it... And hey! It's still the same... (Pardon my smilies... :woot: Sort of see not much point in being sad about the fact anymore. )

Wondering if I made myself clear in this post? Well, ya, bottomline is that close to 1GB has disappeared. (Now that's concise... :shy: )

Thanks again to everyone, but I am still trying to relocate my lost space. Any more help will be greatly appreciated.

:bow: :bow: :bow:

Best regards,

Silencedge

#87301

:woot:

#87305

@DinoJr: Don't just :woot: at me... HELP HELP!!!

This forum sure looks fun.

Just some thoughts here.

Thanks to everyone to take the trouble to read through the long long essays which I have penned down. >.

Oh my, aren't you guys all a great bunch.

I'm glad I spent my time here! :woot:

#87331

did anything work for you or is it still happening?

#87345

I have the same problem actually. Initially I allocated only 3gb to the OS partition thinking that XP would use about a gig and the remaining 2gigs would be sufficient for misc junk. Well, as you figured it out, it didn't. The OS acted the same way as yours and started to eat up whatever space was left in the partition.

My investigation returned a bunch of reasons for the behavior (making it sound scientific ):

Now, every time you update the OS via windowsupdate, whatever you download get stored in the primary OS drive. That's one thing that eats up space. And I'm not even sure if windows deletes the installed update packages themselves. Every couple of months I end up downloading 20mb or so updates. So in 5 months I get 1/10 gig already gone.

Second, internet history, pictures, thumbnails, cache are all in the primary drive. Even though you set some of them to 0 they still take up some space. And as time runs the files keep piling up. Again this is a small portion of the space lost.

The big, big, huge, space eater is the documents and settings folder. In there you have all the internet history junk, user data, application data etc. History and app data take quite a lot of space, but not as much as user data. Under user data you have most of your programs saving their settings and internal files. Let's say you have norton antivirus. All the updates that you download through that go the symantec shared folder or whatever it's called. Let's say you have outlook express. All the email messages you save that you collect in your mailbox are stored there. And you can add the smaller miscellaneous programs to the list. And collectively these programs and settings take up a ton of space.

And finally, one more thing that you might have disregarded is the "shared documents" folder. By default this thing is also in the documents and settings under the OS partition. If you don't change the location of shared doc, whatever you want to have shared with other users/network fill up your partition.

If the numbers seem small, try multiplying them by the number of users the system has. It depends on your users, but usually in my system the documents and settings folder by itself takes 1.5gb+ space. And for that I have 2 active users. This is after a couple of months of use of course. When you first install the OS there is nothing much in there, so this might explain why your 1gig went missing.

If you still cannot figure out where the space went then I recommend downloading diskdata, which is a very nice program that draws graphs based on folder and file sizes. Especially if you're after space hogging folders I strongly suggest trying it out.

http://www.diskdata.com/default.htm

Hope this made some sense..

#87356

Now that is a long post.

As for your problem, never had that happen to me before. So basically, I'm here to post useless junk. Muahahahaha! :woot:

#87359

:bow: @voltaic: Thanks voltaic, it all made sense to me. But just one thing to clarify, because though my laptop is acting as the server for the entire flat, a total of 5 users including me, I've not placed anything on sharing and it's just basically using my laptop as a channel to access the internet with. Does that count? As in, would anything be stored in my laptop still?

It's really amazing how much space can get eaten up without much knowledge. Well, just yesterday alone, I left my laptop on, connected to the internet, and I went for class. When I came back about 12 hours later, I found that I've lost 40++ MB. Of course, I have no idea where they went to... I mean, they just sort of... DISAPPEARED. :rant:

You mentioned about the internet files and folders. I have cleared internet files through the control panel, as well as ran disk cleanup. I guess this should be sufficient to remove whatever junk there is, or do you think there's other things to be done?

Anyway, the windows update has been disable. So I rule out that possibility you mentioned.

:bow: @wookietv: Well, in accordance to the article you linked, I've changed my VM sizing. But what I recovered are just those VM which I freed up. Which means, those space which I am trying to recover are still lost.

I now have 1200MB space free (I'm supposed to have 2.0GB), so the low disk space warning is not showing anymore. But my disk space is still decreasing. I've got Samurize on, so I can see the megabytes going down every now and then, but they don't get recovered. Since the last reset, I've lost about 6MB. Through normal usage... no downloading or anything. Cleared my internet cache and files but the recovery was not sufficient to make up for the loss.

:cry: :cry: :cry:

Umm... rather lost now. Because so many of you guys have suggested reasons and ways to rectify this, but I am still unable to recover my disk space which went lost. My apologies if I disappoint.

HA! Hate XP. :rant:

Apple...

#87365

if the app that voltaic suggested doesn't work, why don't you try this... leave the computer be for x amount of time, turn off all extraneous applications (i.e. docks, samurize, etc.) once that time is up, do a search on your hard drive for all files modified with that time. i think though, you can only search in days so you might have to leave it alone for 1 whole day (i know what you're thinking, no A.S. for 24 hours!!!). this way though, without any interaction by you, you can see what files xp is modifying on it's own. you might also want to kill any processes that are not needed either... things that are not necessarily running apps, but affect your workspace, like shadowing apps...

if this doesn't work, i think i might be flat out of ideas. good luck

#87395

Admittedly, I havent read through the entire thread... but this sounds just like what happened to my computer from a virus a while back.

One of the people on my network in my flat last year had otten a virus of the PE_Party variety. The virus spread accross the network shares etc to all the other computers. Now, my virus scanner caught it, and i told everyone what they had to do to eradicate the virus... but more importantly, what to do to stop it migrating accross the network again and affecting files on my computer (I was going away for a few days but had to leave my computer on as a file server).

Obviously one or more people didnt clean up their computer... because when I came back my computer had been ripped apart by this virus, leaving my main HD partition with 0... yes 0Mb of space left. My virtual mem was full... everything sopped... and restarting didnt reclaim any of the lost space. I tried all the usual clean up methods as well and to no joy...

So, I'm going to ask two things... 1 are you sure your virus definitions are up to date (Sure they are but I have learned through work that it pays to ask the obvious question ) and 2 have you scanned the other computers on the network for viruses? I know you say you dont have any shares... but if they are tunneling through your laptop it may affect it somehow?

Cheers

#87408

you can also try turning off system restore then rebot and then turn it back on. this will force windows to delet all the old system back-ups. do you really need to go back to day one of the system? i mean if you go back that far then you might as well reformat. we cam acrossed this a lot when i worked for best buy, and most of the time it was the system restore out grow its "" cantained file. also, if you are sharing the internet with everyone else wouldnt you be getting part of everyones temp files stored on your system, not sure how that all works there.

just a thought

sebek

#87436

Dear all,

Thanks for all the help render.

@wookietv: That's a long method... Yea, 24 hours without A-S is painful... But anyway, shall give it a try soon... not yet. Otherwise I wouldn't be here...

@oOo The DEEJ oOo: Thanks. I've actually got an up-to-date virus definition database since my AV program auto updates every few hours. And the downloads are small, so I doubt it's the definition tables which are eating up the space.

As for your question about the temp files being left residing in my laptop... I don't know as well...

@Sebek: I tried what you mentioned. I deleted all restore files and got back 600MB disk space. But that's about it. There's no extras which are supposed to be there. I guess it's not the system restore then.

:shy:

Anyway, thanks again everyone who's helped in one way or another. Though I've not been able to recover the space, but I've indeed learnt lots more about optimising my system... as well as to find out what A GREAT PLACE A-S IS!!!

Should I be able to find out the reason behind it, I shall keep you guys posted. Then we can learn something together. (Y)

So... yup! That's it. I believed that almost all possible things to do are already done... or recommended.

And yes! The next purchase shall be A POWERBOOK!!! :who's your daddy:

MANY THANKS. :bow: :bow: :bow:

Best regards,

Silencedge

#87469

I still suggest (or rather insist) that you give diskdata a try (it's shareware so you can use it and get rid of it once you're done).

That is one single program that I appreciate the most.

Once you scan your primary partition with diskdata the little graphs will tell you exactly how the free space is distributed between files/folders/subfolders.

If you're wondering where your space is going, this is certainly an easy way to figure it out.

#87621