hard drive suddenly filling up for no apparent reason

**Mooghaun** · February 5th, 2002, 07:17 PM

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.

**jdc2000** · February 5th, 2002, 07:37 PM

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.

**slipe** · February 5th, 2002, 08:46 PM

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”?

**Mooghaun** · February 5th, 2002, 08:50 PM

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.

**gixer** · February 5th, 2002, 08:53 PM

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

**Train** · February 5th, 2002, 09:13 PM

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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**Mooghaun** · February 5th, 2002, 09:31 PM

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.

**Dr.Gibbs** · February 5th, 2002, 09:36 PM

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).]

**slipe** · February 5th, 2002, 09:50 PM

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.

**Eeyore** · February 5th, 2002, 10:09 PM

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

**Mooghaun** · February 5th, 2002, 10:40 PM

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

**Cliffh** · February 6th, 2002, 12:41 PM

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.

**Dr.Gibbs** · February 6th, 2002, 03:46 PM

Yikes, Mooghaun, you should be more careful deleting things like that... they might be important

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.

**Mooghaun** · February 6th, 2002, 05:29 PM

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

**jdc2000** · February 6th, 2002, 05:43 PM

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

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