• Space disappearing on my HDD on Windows Vista 64-bit?
    6 replies, posted
Hey, I have this odd problem where my HDD space keeps getting used up, each day I have more and more used up space, and I don't know why. I just reformatted my PC, I deleted the whole partition and reinstalled Vista... it's saying I have 104 GB of space used, and I have like almost nothing installed. More and more space is getting used up each day and I don't install anything! It's ridiculous. Can anyone provide any assistance with this? Would be really appreciated, thanks in advance.
Use [url=http://www.hdtune.com/]HDTune[/url] to check the health of the drive and make sure you don't have failing sectors. Then check disk management to see if you have any "Unallocated space" on the drive.
Could it be System Restore Points? Do do Naelstrom's suggestion anyways. Also install WinDirStat, it maps out your HDD and shows what is taking up your space.
System restore or hibernation might do it. Try rightclicking on the drive, going to properties, then click on clean up. See if any of the options are large. I leave thumbnails alone since I prefer having previews, and they aren't too large. If nothing is large there, go to the next tab and click to clean restore points. If still nothing, go to start, type command, right click on command prompt, go to run as administrator. Type: powercfg -h off You might need to reboot, but it should remove hibernation and a large part of your disk should come back.
Yeah I scanned for bad sectors using Windows and I don't think it found anything. When I delete shadow copies a lot of my space gets freed up though. I thought there may have been something else that's causing this, however.
Are you sure you don't have a virus? I had a problem like this before where a virus was constantly decompressing a small file multiple times and it filled my hard drive in a few weeks. Had to format and reinstall.
[QUOTE=tristanguy2;32404337]Are you sure you don't have a virus? I had a problem like this before where a virus was constantly decompressing a small file multiple times and it filled my hard drive in a few weeks. Had to format and reinstall.[/QUOTE] I really doubt it, Vista is a disk space whore, even when nothing is installed. Here are the steps I do on a fresh Vista install, regardless of the version: 1) Disable Volume Shadow Copy (in services) and delete any shadow copies. 2) Disable Superfetch. (in services, can use a shitton of disk space) 3) Disable Search Indexing (can spend hours destroying disk performance at random indexing useless files.) 4) Disable Hibernate (makes a huge hiberfil.sys the size of the amount of RAM in the computer.) 5) If installing updates or service packs, run vsp1cln (after installing SP1) or compcln (after installing SP2) to make the updates and service packs permanent and remove several gigabytes of files. 6) After installing new updates and restarting, goto C:\<WINDIR>\SoftwareDistribution\Download\ and delete all of the contents of that folder. It's basically a huge cache of WU files in case it has to redownload them (most of us have broadband so downloading a few megabyte range files is no issue.) Also, I suggest running Disk Cleanup. There was one time I was losing several gigabytes of space an hour, and it turned out Windows Error Reporting had generated 21+ GB of log files due to a WU bug, and only stopped after a restart. Though Vista generates huge amounts of WER logs in normal use.
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