50% disk space lost (& growing)

charlieheard

I've a fairly new HP desktop with a 360Gb hard disk. Up till recently, I had over a third of the disk full, but then the space started "disappearing" till I was down to less than 2%. I ran WinDirStat, and examined several of the largest folders. I started freeing space by deleting things like old videos I'd downloaded years ago and just hoarded and backing other things up to DVD. I managed save 30Gb, so I breathed a sigh of relief.

A few days later, I was down to 5Gb free, and I'd not used more than a few Mb extra. I started WinDirStat again, but the PC started to become unresponsive. I tried shutting it down, but it hang while trying, and I pulled the plug after half an hour. When I restarted, I was still short of space, but now I had a huge 176Gb of "unknown" space reported in WinDirStat, even when run with administrator privileges. I ran "chkdsk /r" from the recovery console, but it found no real errors, and the space is still missing.

It is now a few days later, and the "unknown" space is up to 184Gb. I've run quickly through my files, but can't find anything obvious missing, so I guess the unknown space is being created by the system. My thoughts are it's either a virus or a disk/system fault, though scans with Norton, Spyware Doctor, Spybot and chkdsk have not revealed the presence of anything unusual. So I guess it's either a very well hidden virus, or a low level disk problem.

Luckily I'm fairly well backed up, and I have a 200Gb disk from an old machine, so I could just Ghost everything across and reformat, but I'd be loathe to do that if I don't have to. And would Ghost copy across the disk error, if there is one?

Has anyone any thoughts or comments?

S0litaire

might be "system restore"
Turn it off and reboot. see how much space you get back..

aliEnRIK

My mates computer did that and it was very nasty trojans. His machine was so badly infected that we ended up wiping the drive and starting afresh
Im not saying thats true here but id guess you either have some infection or you have some backup facility running?

Download MALWAREBYTES (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD NOW')
http://www.download.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html
UPDATE and FULL SCAN
Post the log here AFTER youve deleted everything it finds


reboot

Download HIJACK THIS (Make sure you click 'DOWNLOAD LATEST VERSION')
http://www.filehippo.com/download_hijackthis/
Click DO A SCAN AND SAVE A LOGFILE (Takes seconds) then post the log so we can see whats running
(do NOT do anything else with Hijack but scan and post the FULL log)

charlieheard

Thanks very much for both these replies. I'm running some of the pre-installed HP diagnostic tests on the disk at the moment, which have over 2 hours left to run. I'll be trying your suggestions as soon as they've finished.

It seems to be a slow process running disk checks on a large disk: mind you, I did start out on DOS 3 with 30Mb disk and 1Mb system of memory...

charlieheard

Well I turned off System Restore while I was scanning the disk (still not finished!) and recovered 15Gb, which was a start. I left it scanning the disk while I had something to eat, and when I came back the free space was 191Gb!

I'll still run the HijackThis and Malwarebytes scans anyway, as it's good to check the health of the system, but I need to get on top of why System Restore was hogging things...

[Edit]quick update - ran vssadmin to see what was happening, and found that the upper limit set for my System Restores was "UNBOUNDED"! :eek: No wonder it just kept on increasing. I've recently added and removed a couple of program suites as a trial, which explains why it had grown recently....

Still, thanks again to S0litaire and aliEnRIK (or is that Dwayne Dibbley? )

:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T:T

aliEnRIK

I didnt know they COULD be set at no limits!

charlieheard

aliEnRIK wrote: »

I didnt know they COULD be set at no limits!

Until last night, I didn't know how to check or change it. That means it either came shipped with that setting from HP, or it got corrupted sometime in the past 9 months. Searching for "vssadmin unbounded", it seems I'm not the first. One reason may be that it's much harder to change in Vista: in XP, you could just set a slider in the system settings, but Vista requires a command prompt with admin privileges...

aliEnRIK

I know how to set to specific sizes in Vista. How to set to unlimited has me duped though

S0litaire

aliEnRIK wrote: »

I know how to set to specific sizes in Vista. How to set to unlimited has me duped though

Think by default its set to unlimited.

The first thing I do when i get a Windows PC is turn System restore off and set up a proper backup schedule.

In my opinion: The restore files are just as liable for virus infection as the main OS so you can never be too sure if the restore is clean. So to me it's just a waste of space!

aliEnRIK

S0litaire wrote: »

Think by default its set to unlimited.

The first thing I do when i get a Windows PC is turn System restore off and set up a proper backup schedule.

In my opinion: The restore files are just as liable for virus infection as the main OS so you can never be too sure if the restore is clean. So to me it's just a waste of space!

Not on the computers ive seen. Generally set to around 10-12 Gig on all the vistas ive played about with