The case of the vanishing hard drive space

tekgek · Post by **tekgek** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 6:40 pm

All right, this bug s really annoying. When I turn on my new hp pavilion a1700n, there is always less drive space. I am using windows vista home premium. Any insight would be appreciated.

vicaphit · Post by **vicaphit** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 9:59 pm

are you losing total hdd space, or free space?

I had a problem where my people PC connection was FILLING the free space on my HDD, I got an alert that I had less than 200 MB availible, so I deleted 5 gigs worth of video and restarted. When I was back to doing what I was doing it filled up again and I had less than 50MB.

I finally found a file in the people PC folder that was 39 gigs. I deleted it and it fixed the problem.

maybe there is some self replicating file on your pc that is taking up your free space.

tekgek · Post by **tekgek** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 10:52 pm

oh, sorry, my free space is dissappearing. Whenever I boot up, I've lost at least a little drive space.

KnightRid · Post by **KnightRid** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 5:44 am

either a self replicating file or maybe just the swap file is resizing itself each reboot?

check the virtual drive settings and see if it is set for a static size or a windows managable size.

Mike

T-Shirt · Post by **T-Shirt** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:00 am

Also 'system restore' and 'Volume Shadow Copy' as well as some third party utilities automatically create backupcopies of any file you open/save/change, over time these backups become huge taking up a noticable amount of room.
clearing caches, deleting unnedded "work offline" and old restore files should free up most of this.
beware of utilities like Norton "Undelete" which keep at least one copy of everything you delete (the more you delete, the less space you have

)

Mad_Goku · Post by **Mad_Goku** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:42 am

yeah it would be helpful to know about how much drive space each time too. I mean if you lose like 2 GB everytime you boot up, you got a serious problem....but if it's a few MB here and there, it's probably system restore or swap file or something windows manageable.

rubia126 · Post by **rubia126** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 4:15 am

hi

well i ll sugesst u to go for http://www.infolocktech.com i was having sam,e sort of issues and they help me out
good luck

werewolfdaddy · Post by **werewolfdaddy** » Wed Apr 18, 2007 6:16 am

Have you run an antivirus program like norton or mcafee?

smack323 · Post by **smack323** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:39 am

i would tend to agree with goku- its probally a system restore or something along those lines if its not a huge amount. I usally run spybot every couple months. i havent used anti virus on my computer for over 3 years- just a firewall and spybot to help me catch things if they do get on somehow.

Sovereign · Post by **Sovereign** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 10:51 am

System Restore under Vista can use up to 15% of the drive.

Tim Burton · Post by **Tim Burton** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 11:53 am

It is called BitTorrent and it will eat up your HD space in now time.

DaIceMan · Post by **DaIceMan** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 9:31 pm

System Restore... hahahahahahahahaha.

Anyone ever actually get that to work? I have NEVER seen a case where system restore actually fixed anything. Format C: is my system restore. ;)

zparker · Post by **zparker** » Tue Apr 24, 2007 10:29 pm

actually yes it just worked the other night forme. My user profile on my server had gotten corrupted at some fkin point while logged in. i disconnected, logged back in with remote desktop, and it was crashed down to some temp profile bs. All the while i had my cs source server running but it had crashed when the profile did. I used system restore. it fixed the profile and then i did a full backup of the c and system state so if that bs happens again im covered.

SO YEAH IT WORKS

tekgek · Post by **tekgek** » Thu Apr 26, 2007 8:47 pm

all right, i'll check out hibernation and system restore file sizes. I'll see if that helps, and I'll get back to you.

chotachatri12 · Post by **chotachatri12** » Fri Apr 27, 2007 5:09 am

or just run disk clean up

tekgek · Post by **tekgek** » Sun Apr 29, 2007 9:10 pm

thank you to all. I turned off system restore and got back 10 gigabytes of space!

TristanM · Post by **TristanM** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 2:07 am

It might be a bit late to add to this discussion since it seems to be fixed, but I've noticed that Vista likes to store a lot of temporary garbage. I can run a disk cleanup once a week and get ~2 GB back every time. I also defragged once this month (I've only had the computer a month now) and got 3 GB back. In the space of four weeks that adds up to ~11GB. If that happens every four weeks and you're not running the disk cleanup and defragging on a regular basis, that could cause issues.

A side note - I've only just notices there are buttons for italics and stuff here... I've been typing all my own tags in like a sucker...

Gamble · Post by **Gamble** » Tue May 01, 2007 12:43 pm

Keep SOME system restore space, otherwise if you install something that kills your PC, you're screwed!!

IssE · Post by **IssE** » Tue May 01, 2007 3:55 pm

Yea.. it's not a smart idea to completely turn off system restore, some people say you don't need it but I found it quite useful in the past. I doubt your using that 10 gigs it gave you back but you can also limit it to only use maybe 4 gigs that way it wont bother you and you will always have an alternative when fixing a problem.