So I delete about 600 megs of stuff, reboot my computer, and the space is not there anymore - I have 9 megs free. WTF? I must have more space than that. A virus scan failed to turn anything up. What should I do?
Did you empty your Recycle Bin (assuming a Windows OS)?
Yes.
Are you running windows ME or XP, where the restore points it creates may be chewing up space?
Daizy
What exactly are you deleting? If it’s programs… I hope that you actually uninstalled, rather than deleted, through add/remove?
Daizy
No, 98.
You know… any other poster would just put all their thoughts together in one freaking post. But not I! :rolleyes:
Lastly (No really…) Have you done a scan disk lately? Any chance your hard drive has bad sectors?
Daizy
Kinda guessing here, but maybe Windows is set to automatically manage your virtual memory, and it allocated most of your free space away?
No, it was data files (some old media files) and temp files.
Well, shut my mouth. I just looked again, and we’re back up to 2 gigs free. What keeps doing that?!
Like Daizy said, run scandisk. Your free space is likely being misreported.
You thought it would be easy to root out Hamish’s goat porn? Think again!
I’ve tried to run Scandisk and it keeps saying something is writing to the disk, even though I close all the programs I can identify.
Also, the trash can seemed empty, but after I rebooted and used Disk Cleanup, there were another 100 megs in the trash can, which I deleted once again.
Boot into safe mode and run it from there.
As Joey G has said, do a scandisk from safe mode.
When you do a ctrl/alt/delete… list for us what you have in the close programs dialogue box, after a fresh boot.
Daizy
Best thing to do in the future is search for large files & see where they are.
Also, turn OFF the computer then turn it ON, don’t just reboot it because that is a ‘soft boot’ & you don’t want that.
It seems pretty simple to me to use windows explorer and see exactly what is taking up the disk space.
Use SequoiaView: http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
Absolutely amazing little program that gives you a visual representation of your hard drive’s contents. Its nice to see such a broad overview where I can immediately spot files I never knew existed which are needlessly taking up space.
Could someone possibly be spying on you with monitoring software? That would fill up your disk with log files rather quickly as well as explain the constant disk-writes.