re: Free space disappearing on HD.
Friday, November 27, 2009 at 9:10 pm
Windows XP Annoyances Discussion Forum
Posted by epoch
(87 messages posted)
According to WinDirStat's Help file:
On my XP WinDirStat shows more than a GB , what's wrong?
Nothing. XP quite often creates rather big 'System restore points' under C:\System
Volume Information, but denies access to it.
Also in the Help file:
If you have activated "Show Unknown" in the Options menu, each drive has an
item. The matter is as follows. On the one hand, WinDirStat knows the total capacity
of the drive and the free disk space. (These values tally with the number shown by
the Windows Explorer properties dialog for the drive.) On the other hand WinDirStat
has determined the sizes of all files and added them up. Well, is the difference:
Total capacity minus free space minus determined sum. This rest can be greater than
zero by serveral reasons. For instance there can be directories (e.g. "System Volume
Information") with read-access denied. Their size cannot be included in the sum calculated
by WinDirStat. In the treemap, the item is colored vivid yellow.
So while having "Unknown files" appearing in WinDirStat isn't something you should
be alarmed about (My system shows as much as 8.8% (20.5Gb) as ""), the presence
of DIR000000 files should be followed up as suggested. The best explanation I've
seen about .chk files is this:
Chk files are unrecognizable 'broken bits' of files. If they were once txt files
then you can open them in notepad and resave the contents as a text file. If they
are parts of a system file, e.g. an EXE or a DLL or such, then if you open them in
notepad all you will see is garbage. They basically are no use to you.
All you can do, apart from recovering text from them, is delete them to get the disc
space back. You cannot, even with the advanced knowledge required, reassemble them
back into usable files.
As for your original issue (if a faulty hard drive isn't the culprit), first try
disabling your browser cache by following the instructions found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_your_cache.
It's possible that an update to your browser has this reset to cache pages where
you had it set to not cache before the trouble started.
Next, if you have System restore enabled then it may be that your System Restore
points are being set automatically everytime you make a major change to your system
such as when you install or uninstall a program. To clear your System Restore Points,
go to Start>>Run...>> and type "C:\WINDOWS\system32\Restore\rstrui.exe" (without
the quotes) into the box and hit . Go to the "System Restore Settings" link
and check the box next to "Turn off System Restore" and hit "Apply". Uncheck the
box and it "Apply" again to turn it back on if you want but you may want to leave
it off while you test and see if it solves your problem. DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK
THOUGH!!! A way to clear all but your most recent Restore points is by going to
Start>>Run...>> and type "cleanmgr" (without the quotes) into the box and hit .
Go to the "More Options" tab and select "Clean up..." under the System Restore section.
If you use Hibernate Mode then this writes a copy of your system state directly to
your hard drive and could be another source of the issue. To disable this:
1. Go to Start>>Run...>> and type "Powercfg.cpl" (without the quotes) into the
dialog box and hit .
2. Click the "Hibernation" tab, then uncheck the box next to "Enable Hibernation"
3. Press "OK."
Check your PageFile (Virtual Memory) settings. Windows may be dynamically resizing
the pagefile.sys file in order to run programs on your system efficiently. To change
thiis:
1. Go to Start>>Run...>> and type "sysdm.cpl" into the dialog box and hit .
2. Go to the Advanced tab and hit the "Settings" button under the "Performance"
section.
3. Go to the Advanced tab and hit the "Change" button under the "Virtual memory"
section.
4. If the radio button next to "System managed size" is selected then change it
to "Custom size" and change the Maximum size to 1.5 times your total memory on the
system. Change the Initial size to 1/2 the Maximum size.
5. These are the recommended settings but you may choose to try something lower
if you like. You may want to change the option to "No paging file" just for testing
purposes but Microsoft does not recommend this.
If you use PeerGuardian (although I don't see it in the HijackThis log) then your
history.db file may be growing too large. All it is is a history of all the connections
it's blocked/allowed and I've caught this hogging disk space before. To get rid of
it (assuming you're using PeerGuardian2), open up PeerGuardian and click on 'View
History'. Then click file, then click 'Clear Database'. Just do this one every couple
of months to keep it a small file. Also, under the 'Settings' tab of the main program,
uncheck 'Log Allowed Connections' under the History heading, and that should keep
the file smaller too.
These are just some of the main potential culprits. The frustration both you and
those who responded are feeling is that in order to diagnose the problem accurately
we would need have first-hand access to your system. Otherwise, we can only offer
unsubstantiated guesses. I see that you have posted your HiJackThis log to http://forums.techguy.org/windows-xp/879194-disappearing-freespace.html
which is good and I looked through it myself but don't see any obvious signs of malware
either (although I'm no expert.)
On Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 3:28 am, Reuven Ben-Daniel wrote:
> I am using WinDirStat.As you can see on former replies, I have deleted files from
>C:\ to make freespace I.3GB. Then it gradually decreased to 1.24GB, and now it
is
>1.1GB. Checking on WinDirStat again there are no more clues. But on starting WinDirStat
>before the graphic display. it states--C:\Total 7.4GB, Free1.1GB, Used85.0%. So
>it is stating that 1.5% is unaccounted for. I have already used CHKDSK disk, and
>the result was no corruption.
>
>
>
Epoch
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