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workstation slowly losing disk space

By lmoseley ·
I have a workstation that is slowly losing disk space. It is XP pro w/ SP2. I have ran two different spyware scans, 2 different virus scans (all full scans) and it came back clean. At first I thought it was a hard drive going bad. I cloned the drive to another new hard drive and the problem still persists. Last night I left the machine with over 14 GB free on the primary partition. This morning it has less than 9 GB. This machine was unplugged from the internet all last night. I (believe) have ruled out a virus and/or spyware. I have ruled out it being a faulty hard drive. I am at a loss to what it could possibly be. Any suggestions?

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The why of it

by Strayer In reply to Hi :-)

Dear dawgit,
I suggested the clean install becuase it is on the 2nd HD. Can't he trouble shoot the bug or whatever it is on the original HD? I know it would have to be a dual boot, but that's not hard.
Also, with a clean install, he would see if it happens again.
I have never heard of this one before.
Thanks for the HI.
If there are topics I am able to post on, I will.
Maude

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Have you tried?

by l.natoli In reply to The why of it

Have read briefly through all the posts but i have not seen anyone mention safe mode. Unless i missed it.

Have you tried Booting up in safe mode without networking and leave it over night?

If it solves the issue i would suspect it is a worm/virus....

Anyways its worth a shot.

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Running "Ghost"?

by KB3U In reply to Have you tried?

Norton's Ghost has the irrating procedure of maintaing all backups created - does not take long to use up "lots" of space.

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Consider this thread closed...

by lmoseley In reply to The why of it

The problem was in fact the c:\windows\softwaredistribution folder. For whatever reason it had become bloated and/or corrupted. By stopping and starting the Automatic Update service, renaming the old folder, and restarting the service (the folder gets recreated automatically). Once that was done and I verified that the new folder was in fact recreated and working properly, I removed the old folder. I appreaciate all of your posts to this topic.

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Why?

by yinbig In reply to Consider this thread clos ...

Why did this not show up when searching for new files created between x & y then?

(Hidden files included)

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BootVis

by yinbig In reply to workstation slowly losing ...

Have you ever run BootVis? If so (and evin if BootVis is removed) the counters may be still on. To remove the counters check the web for the regedit.

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BootVis was still tracing

by mindsinker In reply to BootVis

I was having this slow hard drive leak and I checked bootvis and under trace I noticed that I was able to click on Trace/Stop Tracing and that fixed my problem. The leak has stopped. Thanks yinbig.

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Search for Recently Modified/Created Files

by netgenner In reply to workstation slowly losing ...

Use windows search facility to search your entire hard drive for files modified/created in the last day and then switch to a detail view in the results window and sort by date descending. You should be able to identify the most recently created/modified files and their sizes. Ensure that you are also searching hidden and system files.

This way it should be obvious which files are being added or growing continuously.

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What Applications are installed ?

by shrikant In reply to workstation slowly losing ...

Hi,

I want to know what all applications are installed on your machine, cause i have faced such problems due to application malfunction which created huge size file . So if you mention the thirdparty applications installed on your machine

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Virtual Memory

by ljdavy In reply to workstation slowly losing ...

Hi, I haven't had time to read all the posts so maybe someone has suggested this.
Windows allocates disk space as virtual memory and the amount it grabs is at the whim of the magement system unless you have manually set boundaries of min and max space.
Right click My computer, then click properties, Advanced, performance - settings, advanced.

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