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Disappearing Free Disk Space

4

440sixpack

Senior member
I've run into a strange problem I can't seem to figure out - in a nutshell my free HD space slowly disappears over time.

I.E. upon bootup, I have about half of my disk space available (IBM T42 w/60 GB HDD). However, after WinXP boots up, the free disk space dwindles slowly over time down to 0. What's odd is that usually there are no actual files that are taking up the space. I use both TreeSize and V-Com's Size Manager, which report actual files and directories that add up to the expected ~27GB. However, the reported total free disk space, such as in the properties of the HD in question, or in the status bar of the above applications will still show the reduced free disk space. For the life of me I can't figure out how free disk space can disappear without there being files that take up the space.

I've run a full virus/spyware scan with updated AntiVir, Ad-Aware, Spybot and chkdsk. No problems of any kind. Oddly, a couple of times there WAS a file that ballooned up to fill the disk, trace.log in the /system32/logfiles/wmi folder.

Any ideas where to go from here?
 
Originally posted by: 440sixpack
I've run into a strange problem I can't seem to figure out - in a nutshell my free HD space slowly disappears over time.

I.E. upon bootup, I have about half of my disk space available (IBM T42 w/60 GB HDD). However, after WinXP boots up, the free disk space dwindles slowly over time down to 0. What's odd is that usually there are no actual files that are taking up the space. I use both TreeSize and V-Com's Size Manager, which report actual files and directories that add up to the expected ~27GB. However, the reported total free disk space, such as in the properties of the HD in question, or in the status bar of the above applications will still show the reduced free disk space. For the life of me I can't figure out how free disk space can disappear without there being files that take up the space.

I've run a full virus/spyware scan with updated AntiVir, Ad-Aware, Spybot and chkdsk. No problems of any kind. Oddly, a couple of times there WAS a file that ballooned up to fill the disk, trace.log in the /system32/logfiles/wmi folder.

Any ideas where to go from here?
Click to expand...

Go into System Volume Information on all drives and look there. You'll probably need to change permissions first. And you've got a router between your PC and the public internet, right?
 
log files
here at work we are test running this new manufacturing system. there must be a problem somewhere because several times we check the server and it has no hd space left. for some reason, one of the log files was taking up like 18 GB of space. i guess it just kept writing and writing, ignoring the limit setting.

 
Originally posted by: dclive

Go into System Volume Information on all drives and look there. You'll probably need to change permissions first. And you've got a router between your PC and the public internet, right?
Click to expand...

Okay, I'm in the SVI folder, what do I look for? And yes, there's a router between the PC and the internet.
 
Now that you've opened up permissions, have a disk scanner look in there. But also look manually yourself for anything taking up inordinate amounts of space. I've seen entire FTP warez sites hidden in there.
 
Unfortunately, nothing from the scans. Very strange as there's no actual files growing, just the slowly dwindling free disk space. I suppose I should just wipe and reinstall, but being my work machine I don't really have time to go through all that. Thanks for your help so far.
 
Why wipe and reinstall? You can still find it, it's just a question of where to look.

For example, to preclude a filter driver loading (at least as best you can) have you done all of this scanning in safe mode, where a malware program would have a tougher time (but still can) mask the files you're scanning so you can't see them properly?

Do you know what all directories in c:\program files and c:\pf\common files are for?

If you take two scans, one 24 hours after another, what are the differences? That alone should tell you enough to point to the culprit.
 
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