Topic: Full hard drive problem

[Nige]

Can anyone here help?
My friend has a 40 gig hard drive on his computer which is more than enough for his general needs as he's not even connected to the internet. He came to save a few pictures he'd took with his digital camera but then had a warning message flash up which said his hard drive was full. On examining his computer, I found that even with all his picture albums and photo editing programs etc. etc. His total disc usage was only about 10 gigs. This includes the operating system and everything else. So we set about finding where the missing 30 gigs were but can't..we can't even de-frag it as the de-frag needs 15% free space and he doesn't even have 1%, so the computer is totally blocked with something and it says so when you click properties on the C drive. But we can't find anywhere this missing 30 gigs might be....anyone help please?
Nige

[Clive]

 Nige.  I'm not a techie but despite not being connected to the internet, there is still a possibility that he could be infected by a virus from a removable drive such as a floppy disc or CD.  Hopefully there will be an antivirus program installed so try running it and let us know the result.  A real techie will be along later.  

[Lona]

Hi Nige and welcome to pc-pals.

Have you checked the clipboard incase your friend has been storing pictures to it. If he has been editing pictures and not clearing them from the clipboard it could be eating up his space.  30 gigs seems an awful lot though.

Also if his drive has been partitioned it could just be the C: drive that's full. His he running XP?

[Nige]

Hi Clive and Lona,
   Thanks for the very quick replies. He has Norton AV on his computer which we ran to see if a virus had gotten in but it came up clean...It's a real mystery why we can't find where the missing 30 gigs are..I ran Windows Explorer on all his files and folders, hidden ones as well and we still came up with 10 gigs used...Wouldn't the clipboard show up on one of his files? I don't know?
But when you look at the de-frag 'diagram' where it shows you in different colours the actual usage, this 30 gigs was shown as a solid block, not broken up...unusual, I reckon.
Nige

[Nige]

Sorry, forgot to mention, yes, he has XP Home edition and no, the hard drive isn't partitioned.
Nige

[Clive]

Have you re-booted since this problem started?  Sometimes a re-boot can cure all ills.    You might also like to try a system restore while you are waiting.

[Nige]

Yes, we re-booted it several times but haven't tried the system restore, that's one option we have. If he'd been connected to the internet, I would have assumed it could have been ads and spyware, so would have run Spybot and Adaware, but he's not...
Nige

[joudi]

Hi Nige,

I'm not one of the techies whom Clive told about.    

I'm thinking of the size reserved to the bin, (maybe).

Logically, the size of the bin must be part (included in) of the operating system. But maybe it's worthy to try it anyway, as you'r going to lose nothing.

Right click the "Bin" (on the desktop), and take "Property". There you'll find the size of the space reserved to it. The windows default configuration is usually about 10 % of the HDD. If it's much more than that, you can replace it to the 10 %  .

[Nige]

Thanks for that,
We ran disc clean-up which emptied the bin and all the temporary files but there was only about 2 megs of rubbish in there...I just wished there was a program which told you exactly where the disc space was being used up, then we could get rid of it, if it wasn't for the fact that we couldn't load a new program on there, not enough room  :-[
Nige

[joudi]

No Nige !   I didn't mean that. I didn't speak about the bin contents. I spoke about the "RESERVED SPACE FOR THE BIN", (the maximum allowed space for the bin to take from the hard drive.)

[Tony]

Hi Nige,

Right, regards Clives question regards virus scanning: You say he scanned with Norton, but if he does not connect to the Web, his Virus Definitions will not be upto date.

Regards his missing 30GB, what does "System  Info" say regards its size?

Right click on > My Computer left or right Click > System Info, on the System Tab down the bottom it should say something like 37.31GB

I'm on a 40GB HD, and thats the figure it shows for mine.

Sorry I'm off to make tea now

 

[Tony]

No Nige !   I didn't mean that. I didn't speak about the bin contents. I spoke about the "RESERVED SPACE FOR THE BIN", (the maximum allowed space for the bin to take from the hard drive.)

joudi there's no need to shout   and in anycase I'll eat my hat, and everybody else's if its 30GB  

[Lona]

Hi Nige, have you actually looked to see how much space your Dad's pictures are using.?

You could burn photos to disc and then delete photos then see what space is showing.

My Hubby got a new digi camera for his Xmas and was taking pictures like they were going out of fashion.  Before he knew it he had 3 gig of pictures as was saving them all as bmp files.

[daveeb]

Sounds very much like norton protected files (recycler) to me. I cant for the life of me remember how to get norton to properly delete files but i did have a similar problem which was resolved after tweaking the norton settings.  

[daveeb]

eeeek i've changed sex again