Low disk space issue

[rkharikrishnan]

I am getting low disk space warning on my C drive after working for some time. I didnt understand why this happens. When i am working the disk space gets filled and after sometime free space in C becmoes 0 bytes. Can any one help me why this happens?

 

[Rik]

Hi rkharikrishnan and welcome to TechSpot.:wave:

Your problem is caused by you running out of hard drive space.

You should run disk cleanup. Also, you should delete any unwanted files.
Turning hibernation off and system restore off then back on again will also help.

Your only permant fix would be a bigger hard drive. If you have a lappy then you will have to reinstall windows, if you have a pc then you could add a hard drive and move some files onto it.

 

[rkharikrishnan]

still there is issue

hi,
thanks for the reply.
but this does not seems to solve my issue. i have more than 3 gb free space in my c drive. But after i work for some time the space is getting lesser and lesser and within 1-2 hour my C drive gets filled up (the whole 3 gb). This seems to be some spayware or virus. Any idea about this?

 

[Rik]

That is not normal spyware symptoms. Do you get any warning popups from windows? If so, what exactly do they say? I need to know precisely, take a screenshot if you have to.

 

[technicalfury42]

You say you are working. In what program?

If you are exceeding your RAM and/or your software uses a large cache, Windows could be dynamically allocating a large page file to compensate, which rapidly eats up disk space triggering the warnings.

 

[dogburp]

I have the same

I've got something filling up my hard disk, which goes from 2.6 GB free to 120KB if I leave the machine alone and don't even run any programs. I've look in task manager and deleted any start up progs I don't think are necessary but all to no avail. I only have 1GB memory so would be surprise if it was disk caching.

checked with "search" to find modified files but can't find any new one's of this sort of size or of course lots of smaller files with same date/time stamp.

Does any one know of a program to monitor what program is writing to the hard disk?

Any help would be gratefully accepted

 

[Bobbye]

Suggest running the following in the order given:

1. Disc Clean-up
2. Error Check.
3. Defrag

See how much this cleans up.

 

[Nodsu]

Well, defrag is not going to clean up anything, so it's a waste of time.

You are talking like this appens all the time. When the hard disk fills up, what do you do to fix it? Delete some stuff? Reboot?

Use a graphical filesystem program like SequoiaView to get an overview where your disk space goes.

This constant eating of disk space could be some program with a serious memory leak - your swapfile grows without bounds. Some detailed logging going on - you havent played around with Windows system counters, have you? Normal software that you don't remember or don't know how to use - some P2P programs will preallocate all disk space for a download. A corrupt filesystem. Malware - someone is using your computer to host child porn.

 

[dogburp]

Well, defrag is not going to clean up anything, so it's a waste of time.

You are talking like this appens all the time. When the hard disk fills up, what do you do to fix it? Delete some stuff? Reboot?

Use a graphical filesystem program like SequoiaView to get an overview where your disk space goes.

This constant eating of disk space could be some program with a serious memory leak - your swapfile grows without bounds. Some detailed logging going on - you havent played around with Windows system counters, have you? Normal software that you don't remember or don't know how to use - some P2P programs will preallocate all disk space for a download. A corrupt filesystem. Malware - someone is using your computer to host child porn.

To get rid of it all I reboot, which then starts the progress over again, I've check start up files in both start up folder and registry and they seem fine. And as I said earlier it some thing that is run before I start any other programs or some thing I can't see!!

Thanks for the Sequoia tip I try that when I get time.

Mark

 

[dogburp]

Found it! I'd used a Microsoft program called Bootvis which shows you how long and in what order programs take to load when booting up. This can be set to log what's going on (without notification it's doing it, so it's easy to forget) and this was logging for hours building up a massive log file. Because the file was still being written to a directory listing shows it as Zero size making it difficult to find. I used SysInternals FileMon to help track it down