Help! 2GB of space has disappeared

[Lonyo]

I had a lot of free space, then I installed Alcohol 120% and Norton Ghost.
Ghost had not been run.

My space had disappeared by this point, and I have no idea why.
This is a fresh install of Windows XP (as of 1 day ago).

2GB.JPG

I tried to delete from Command Prompt, but it can't find the file, and if I try and delete through Windows, it says the files are in use
Can anyone help?

 

[BlueWeasel]

Wow, that's really odd...I've never seen that before and I've got Alcohol 120% on my system (but not Ghost).

(1) Have you tried restarting?
(2) If the C:\ drive is FAT32, you could use a Win98/95 boot CD to get to a prompt, and should be able to delete those 3 files manually (that is...if they can be found).

I have to believe it's associated with Ghost, as I can't see how A120% would do something like that.

 

[n0cmonkey]

You did have all updates before getting on a network right? Antivirus and spyware programs don't pick anything up? Tried deleting it from safe mode? Thought about buying a bigger hard drive where 2GB won't make much of a difference?

 

[Lonyo]

I partitioned 5GB of space for a pure OS install, not even programs.
But it makes no difference how big it is, I freed up an extra 1GB of space by disabling hibernate, and now another file has been created and the previous ones have grown in size, so the 1GB I did have free is now gone.
I have a 1.5GB file, a 1 GB file and a 500MB file now.

WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?

 

[Lonyo]

I booted in safe mode, and it claims the file is being used by a program or user.
HOW?
There was "no" user on tank manager, abd about 8 processes, none of which I could close.
How do you delete a file the command prompt won't recognise, and that you don't know what it is or what created it?

 

[sandorski]

I've had upto 8gb just disappear at times. I think it's WinXP using it up for some reason, Swap File or a Windows Recovery Point are my guesses.

 

[oog]

go to sysinternals.com and download process explorer to see what process is holding onto the file. if it's explorer, you can kill explorer from the task manager while you have a command window open to delete the files.