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Harddrive space shenanigans

Rifraf

I know just enough to be a danger to myself
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I have a 500gb harddrive which shows 465gb available. It's 5 years old and have never had a lick of problem. When you click start and then computer it shows how much space you have available etc...well, the last 3 or so weeks I've been noticing the space just goes down for no apparent reason.

This morning when woke it from sleep it showed 91.6gb free of 465, but later today when working on my personal mod I happened to notice it said 71.2gb free of 465. How could it report 20gb just gone in a matter of hours? I haven't downloaded anything, no windows updates. Yes, I'm copying files from one mod to another and duplicating the textures, but certainly no 20gb worth.

Anyone have an explanation as to why it might be doing this? I ran Auslogics diskdefrag about a month ago. Should I try it again?
 

Majestic

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While I have never experienced this problem it could be the HD is about to fail especially if it's 5 years old. HD's usually only have a life-span of a few years depending on how often it's used, if it's a main drive or a data drive and if you get any viruses. That said it could be that you picked up a virus as some viruses target hard-drives I lost a hard-drive a couple of years back due to one. A 2TB HD at that which was like 6-12 months old due to a virus.

465GB available is normal, windows is a hog and always takes HD space away, huge amounts. My laptop has a 1TB but I only get 930GB. I can't recall how much it takes away from a 2TB but it's over 100GB.
 

Rifraf

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I'm thinking a possible virus. running scan now, but have lost 10gb in the last hour during the scan. will run disk check next depending on results. Been googling and found reference to virus that creates empty files over and over.
 

Majestic

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Let us know how you go mate.
 

Rifraf

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Thanks Majestic. It wasn't until I came here that "generally" nobody cared to hear about your follow up to problems. Yes there are some greats over at FO and even the well established older modders from FF, but that's why I like this place. :thumbsup:

I'll preface, by saying Vista sucks. :) Several scans came back no viruses. Decided to run disk cleanup and it only showed about 200mb of space to be reclaimed. I selected to clean up the restore points as well, though Vista doesn't show you how much space that occupies. Anyway, after a few moments I got back about 140GB of space, yes GB.

I do value system restore so after some research found you can't just use a little slider to select the size you want to allocate to it anymore. Stupid Vista. Anyways, after a cmd prompt session I lowered the allotted space to 10 GB and will see how that goes.

I may have been premature with the virus notion and thinking now it was restore just building upon itself. I'll monitor everything and go from there. Thanks for the info
 

CABAL

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I think I'm going to boot up 7 and check to make sure system restore isn't eating my drive...
 

Rifraf

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Probably a good idea Cabal. My disk space seems to have normalized now and is not decreasing by the hour any longer. It was as if because my disk space was getting low, system restore kept taking even more as a fail safe move or something?

I'll run some more virus scans to be safe and defragment the drive again, but seems to have fixed it. :sweat:
 

Majestic

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Glad to hear you got it sorted. I normally re-format every 6 months on my desktop, on this laptop I'll have to wait until I own the sucker in about 12-18 months. I also don't normally do system restore points as I end up re-formatting before I need them, and my solution to a windows issue is to just re-format anyway as I store very little on C drive and have back up's of anything I do like fonts on a portable drive and on my data drive.

John Shepard's (Stargate Atlantis) book of PC repairs might be turning off and then back on his laptop, mine is to reformat the bugger. :lol2:

Thanks Majestic. It wasn't until I came here that "generally" nobody cared to hear about your follow up to problems. Yes there are some greats over at FO and even the well established older modders from FF, but that's why I like this place. :thumbsup:

Indeed, so few decent people exist elsewhere in the community. As you said some good people do exist at FO and A2Files. But I think we have the friendliest and help community right here with a excellent team of staff, myself excluded! :p :lol:
 
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