hard drive suddenly filling up for no apparent reason

Earlier today I had more than 1Gb free space on my hard drive.

I scanned in a photo at 1200 dpi and when I tried to print it I was told there was not enough memory and then not enough space on my scratch disk. So I followed the instructions from "Help" on my Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2 and decreased the
memory. Then where it said if primary disk full change to secondary disk, I changed this from None to C:/

I still got the not enough space message when I tried to print again. So I checked drive C:/ and it showed 576Mb. I tried printing again unsuccessfully and my space went down to 319Mb.

I did a disk cleanup and deleted several games from my desktop. The hard space now showed 39.2Mb

I then uninstalled Photodeluxe with all my saved photos and this brought my space up to 118Mb.

I restarted the computer and checked again and I could hardly believe when the C:/ showed 39.2

I then tried a scan and after all errors were fixed my space was 144Mb.

I tried defragging next and it stuck at 54%. I restarted and the space had down to 128Mb.

I then did a Typical Restore and the space went down to 48mb

I've used the computer since then then on the internet, saving nothing apart from two normal emails and my space is down to 33.4Mb

How could I have lost so much space after deleting so much. Everything that went to the Recycle Bin was immediately deleted.

I have far less games, music or other items on my computer than I had earler today, yet I'm almost out of space.

Is there any way I can stop this crazy situation happening.

Please help, somebody.

Try pressing Control+Alt+Delete to see what is running. End Task anything except Systray and Explorer, and see if you still lose space. It wouldn't hurt to scan for viruses with the latest virus updates either.

First of all, scanning a photo at 1200 DPI is just insane. Take a photo with a fixed focus Nikon on a tripod and the processed photo might have 300 DPI tops. Most hand held shots are closer to 200 DPI as a point where you are spinning your wheels. Read this and advance to the next page where he runs some tests on a photo taken with a fixed focus Nikon on a tripod. http://www.scantips.com/basics08.html

Now you take this enormous image to the printer spooler, which takes more space than the size of the original image since it has to do some complex stuff. My guess that the missing space is somewhere in the printer spooler. They aren’t always good about returning the space if you don’t print the job. Purge your print job in the printer folder properties and reboot.

What is a “Typical Restore”?

Ended all tasks in Control Alt Delete except Explorer and System Tray. This brought my space up to 60Mb. I then tried the diskclean up and all that could be removed was 0.7Mb. I did this and immediately checked my space and it had gone down to 56Mb.

The virus scan showed nothing.

Hi Mooghaun
Sounds like your Photodeluxe could be creating HUGE temp files every time that your print fails. Have you deleted all your temp (.tmp) files? They can really take up some space. Do a 'Find Files' for *.tmp and get rid of them all.
Also temporary internet files can mount up- either restrict the amount of disc space they are allowed or delete them from IE/tools/internet options
I suppose a virus is not out of the question too?
Also, if you get no joy after this - try running some drive checking software - normally available from your HDD manufacturers web page.
Suspect its the first thing though somehow.

Good Luck
Post back
Gixer

What is a “Typical Restore”?
A compaq method of saving your backed up OS.

And his hdd has a darn BOMID in It also.
What he need to do is hook in a second Hdd. And it will need to be less than 8.4GB. BIOS limitation.

That scan was 32MB in size.

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SMILE
and post back
[ Book mark this post to find it again]

ok here's what I've done so far, i was first checkingo out slipse's advice. So tried to purge prints documents but there was none there. then I uninstalled my printer and reinstalled then rebooted but this made no difference.

Gixer,I earlier removed all the temp internet files from Internet Options. I'm pretty sure everything else temporary is gone using the diskclean up but I'm just going to look now in Find Files for .temp and delete any that's there.

Use Find -> Files or Folders in the Start Menu and search for files modified in the last 24/48/whatever hours (however long it's been since this started). There will be lots... sort the list by size and find the largest ones.

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Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

[This message has been edited by Dr.Gibbs (edited 02-05-2002).]

I just tried a scan of a 4 X 5 ½ photo at 1200 DPI and the scan was just over 90Mb.

My film scanner puts out a 30Mb scan which I often send to the printer. If I print that 30 Mb file at 1200 X 2400 the print spooler takes well over 500 Mb. I had to increase the size of my boot partition to accommodate it since I couldn’t move the print spooler in Win 98.

My 512Mb RAM is barely sufficient to work extensively in Photoshop with a 30Mb file.

I think Dr Gibbs has the answer to finding your lost space. Also do a search for Spool – the spool folders should be empty.

You hve several thing working here.The scans, as mentioned, may leave TMP extention tiles behind, which on a scan that large (in color) can be enormous. Use the Find as mentioned and look for *.tmp files. You can delete all of those. Then clear the Recycle Bin. After all that, I would run SCANDISK again.

The other thing changing you space is the Windows Swapfile. Type DIR C:\WINDOWS\WIN386.SWP to see the size of that. That file will change size as you open program or scan an image. There is not much you can do about that. But that may explain some of the space lost. While you are running, you have both an increased swapfile size in addition to the TEMP files created.
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TWO Cents
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[This message has been edited by Eeyore (edited 02-05-2002).]

OK I tried Dr Gibbs advice and searched for modified files at the period this problem happened. I found a few large and removed them, such as Ezphoto 5,120.. temp file and a file called Raw which was 105KB and deleted these. The other files were only about 1KB.

I also searched for *.temp files and there was none. I must have deleted them in the Disk cleanup that I ran earlier.

Anyway I removed the deleted files from Recycle Bin and this brought my space up to 132Mb.

Eeyore, I checked the Windows Swapfile and the reading is 40,96...

I must try to check the spool folders

You might want to check out this nice little program.
http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/stori...,19818,00.html

It'll give you a graphical representation of how much space the various file & folders are using on the drive.

Yikes, Mooghaun, you should be more careful deleting things like that... they might be important https://discussions.virtualdr.com/ I was only suggesting that you do the search to see what's being modified, not to delete big files... although, from the sound of things, there was nothing that large (was that 5 meg file the largest one you found?), so I am at a complete loss.

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Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

Hi, I'm back online. I deleted a lot of stuff during the past hour, games, files that weren't all that important, etc and got my hard drive space up to 278MB.

I also took Cliffh's advice and downloaded the datadisk utility. I ran this on drive C:/ and my free space was shown as 284.872 I can't understand this large disparity from the above.

I've got less on my hard drive now that I've had in well over a year and I can't understand what's happened to my space. Before this started I had over 1Gb spare.

By the way Dr Gibbs the 5 meg file was the largest found.

I've got a horrible feeling that if I can't solve this problem I may have to backup my most precious items and reformat my hard drive.

What do you folks think

You could try downloading PC Magazine's DiskPie 2 utility to see what files and/or folders are taking up the most space.
http://www.pcmag.com/category/0,2999,s%253D1478,00.asp

jdc2000 I think the Diskdata utility I downloaded from zdnet is probable similar to to what you're suggesting. (cliffh's advice)

I looked at the files and folders and nothing looks out of the ordinary. I seem to recognise the large files and all the temporary files are gone.

Are you absolutely certain you haven't got a virus? My office just got hit with NIMDA last week, in spite of virus scanning software on each desktop and the server. The desktops were generally ok, but the server couldn't keep up with file replication and we were losing disk space at an incredible rate. See this description. We had hundreds of the .eml files described. Follow the repair instructions carefully - do the patches first. Hope it's not what you've got.

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mastman

[This message has been edited by mastman (edited 02-06-2002).]

mastman, thanks for this information.
It does sound like my problem.
I'm going to check this out now.

I'll report back in due course.
Mooghaun

Well I did a virus scan (twice) and a thorough check and it came up with nothing.

I am a home computer user and come to think of it I have neither received nor opened an attachment for months.

So the mystery is so far unsolved.

The first time I ran Disk Data, I kept drilling down through the listings until I found that the Netscape email directory was using over 150MB, the Outlook Express email was using 200+MB. Couldn't hurt to check it all out, might find some surprises https://discussions.virtualdr.com/

BTW, after deleting the trash and compacting/compressing the folders in the two email programs, the directories are down to about 2 or 3MB.

Well, it is possible that your hard drive really isn't physically filling up, and the space is just being reported incorrectly. You should run a thorough scandisk (if you can - it will take awhile, same rules as defrag, quit everything that's running first) and see if it reports any problems. Your BIOS even may be screwed up completely and it may think your drive is a lot smaller than it is... is Windows reporting the correct drive size? Maybe you ought to access your BIOS and auto-scan the IDE channels for the drive info...

Just a few random suggestions that haven't been mentioned https://discussions.virtualdr.com/

BTW, yes, you should back up your stuff NOW... depending on the problem your HDD may become unusable and if anything important is on there you're going to lose it... just be careful, because if you have a virus, it can be transferred through those backup files.

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Never do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

Are you using a drive compression utility? Drivespace, doublespace, or similar? Remember when you're looking for temp files it's *.tmp, not *.temp. The biggest discrepancy seems to me to be:

Quote:

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I then uninstalled Photodeluxe with all my saved photos and this brought my space up to 118Mb

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If you're deleting 1200dpi photos you should find you're getting space back very quickly.

Try doing an a advanced find for files larger than 30MB or so(don't delete them) just find them ,this may give you some idea what large files you have.I don't remember at the moment what file ext Photodeluxe uses as default .pdd ? maybe do a search for this file type as well (don't delete them) just find them .

Just a note on nimda. You don't have to open an attachment to get it. You can get from an infected web page. It you want to take a look to see if you've got it, down load this fix tool and run it:
http://securityresponse.symantec.com...oval.tool.html

Hope you don't have it. Took me about a week to rid my machine of it.Had to keep running the fix tools(3)back-to-back.

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If first you don't succeed-visit the DR.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Mooghaun:
Well I did a virus scan (twice) and a thorough check and it came up with nothing.

I am a home computer user and come to think of it I have neither received nor opened an attachment for months.

So the mystery is so far unsolved.

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1. What size is the file win386.swp?
2. How much RAM do you have?
3. Why do you continue to scan at 1200dpi?
4. Have you run scandisk surface scan in dos mode to verify that your HD is actually nearly full?
5. Are you sure the TEMP folder is empty?
6. Is this folder empty C:\WINDOWS\spool\ printers




[This message has been edited by lukeg (edited 02-06-2002).]

This may be obvious, but since I don't believe you specifically said that you updated your virus definitions just before you ran the virus tests, we probably shouldn't assume that is the case. Did you?

I don't know how to fix your problem, but a glitch in Adobe PhotoDeluxe 2.0 might be the culprit. Every so often, especially when I have a large scan or use the compress feature, Adobe PD 2.0 goes nuts and "eats" nearly 1G of my hard drive. Fortunately, I can hear it crunching away so I just terminate the task, check my HD space (yup, 1G is usually gone), and then use GoBack to revert my HD and reclaim the space. Sorry, if you don't have GoBack, I don't have a clue what to do. Just wanted to give you another line of inquiry to research ... Good luck.

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If I knew then what I know now, I would never have opened that darn computer box!

Hi everyone,I've just gone online (It's 7pm here) and will commence working through your suggestions shortly.
Thanks a million. I really appreciate all your efforts.
Mooghaun.

THE FINAL CHAPTER

Well to start, I did a thorough scandisk and defrag earler today.

Mastman and jmtjet had me concerned about the nimda virus and when I learned it could come from an infected web page I was really worried. I immediately aquired anti-virus updates but a scan showed everything was clean. My next step would be to visit symantec.com to check out the removal tool in case my anti-virus had somehow missed it.

Then I re-read the latest postings in this forum to my problem. The one that really struck the cord was Pandora'a who explained that a glitch in PhotoDeluxe 2.0 (which is what I've got) can eat up nearly IGB of hard drive when doing a large scan. That's what happened to me. I decided to follow this line first before going on to the other suggestions so kindly contributed and which may anyway have in the end given the same result.

I ran my Disk Data utility (thanks Cliffh for suggesting I download this) first to look for large files. I began by checking windows. I immediately noticed huge ~pdt files (I remembered Wonderinguy34 mentioning PhotoDeluxe files might be pdt.

So I clicked on the temp folders in Windows and it said 1,557MB.
(The allocated size is 1562). So I clicked on this and at the top were 4 ~pdt files showing, (1)382MB, (2)323MB, (3)323MB, (4)236MB. The ones after this went from 20MB to 3MB most of which were zip files or Shockwave.

I then did a Files>Folders search for ~pdt and found them as had been listed in Disk Data. I noted that the modified date was 05/02/02 which was the exact day my problem occured. So I deleted them.

Next step was to check my Hard Drive space and it came up as 1.49GB. You folks can imagine my reaction. I screamed so loudly with joy that the family came running into the room to see if I'd gone insane.

Mind you, you people probable also think I'm insane scanning in and trying to print a photo at 1200 dpi. But really, this was one of my very early attempts at scanning photos.


But why do the manufacturers and scanner reviewers make such a big thing about dpi if it's pointless using large amounts as I foolishly tried doing.

Well, my problem is finally solved thanks to the contributors here. I wish you were all living in my town and I'd take you out and buy you a drink tonight. Now thanks to you I can back to normal living again.

You know, I was thinking, owning a computer is like been in a serious relationship. Sometimes, they drive you nuts and you end up almost hating them. Then you try to work it out, and when you succeed, you love them all the more, until the next time ...

Thanks a million folks, and thanks to the people who've set up this fantastic website.

Regards, Mooghaun.

That's what I like about this board - get a few minds together working on a problem and 1t's fixed https://discussions.virtualdr.com/

You might take a look at some of the other files in the \Windows\Temp directory. If you don't want them, delete them. They were put in the \Temp directory because they're supposed to be temporary files, which are supposed to be deleted when the program that's using them is done with them.

I'd image that the ability to scan at such high resolutions would come in handy if you're wanting to blow up a very small portion of the scan. Seems to me that having more dpi to work with would give a shaper image of the enlarged portion of the picture. But it does eat up disk space https://discussions.virtualdr.com/

In regard to the comment

Quote:

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I'd image that the ability to scan at such high resolutions would come in handy if you're wanting to blow up a very small portion of the scan. Seems to me that having more dpi to work with would give a shaper image of the enlarged portion of the picture. But it does eat up disk space

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I had an interesting experience along that line. I was given a very small photo of myself, my wife, and our children taken 25 years ago. I wanted to use it as wallpaper on my desktop. Scanning it at a normal resolution level gave me boxes of color in place of pixels of the same color when I blew it up to screen size. Increasing the resolution made it a reasonable photo to display on the full screen. When scanning it is important to crop the image to the portion that is significant. The rest is just wasted megabytes of garbage. To determine the pixels you need, divide the pixels across or down the screen and divide that by the number of inches across or down the original photo. Use the next higher option provided by the scanning software.

I'm glad you got out of your difficulties.


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"Do right 'till the stars fall"

Just posting as I like to 'hear' all the Yay's! all rights! and I Got it's! (been there)! especially with family members.. you think some poor victim was in the surgery only it's your own kitchen table. "quiet dads working on the pc.."