My hard drive is disintegrating

[zero5uk]

A very strange problem.

The other day i hovered over my C drive to read 3.05 gig of space left. I left my computer on overnight downloading some films and when i awoke i only had 1.95gig though nothing had been transferred or installed on my C drive, as my downloads all go onto my D.

Last night exactly the same happened again. As 1.95 gig is too low for XP to work efficiently i deleted some things and got it back to 2.60 gig of space, but today as i restart my computer it says 2.11. My laptop is a 1.6 ghz processor with 512 ram and the better 2002 version of XP but it is not running like that now, so im getting a little pee'd off.

anyone know what is going on here. Thanks for any replies.

[The Mullet of G]

could be a virus, unless you have pretty decent anti virus software installed in which case its probably not, I presume the total size of the drive isn't changing its only the free space, cause if the total space on the drive is changing then its fairly severe, if not it could be just due to temporary files and page file use, it could also be due to Windows backing up orphaned or damaged files, it sometimes does this after running scandisk etc, running disk cleanup from the system tools menu usually gets rid of the bulk of them, and the sluggish performance could be due to fragmentation, or Windows may be having problems hence it could explain why its backing up damaged files etc causing you to loose hard drive space, ok suggestions for possible cures first of if you don't have anti virus software installed install Norton anti V and run a full system scan taking care to run live update before you do to update your virus deffinitions, then run scandisk with "automatically fix file system errors" and "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors" boxes checked then restart and let it do its stuff, then defragment your hd you may need to run the defrag more than once if you've got a lot of fragmentation, luckily its quicker everytime you run defrag so it shouldn't take to long, if this doesn't help start looking for rogue software that may be consuming hard drive space that it shouldn't, give me a shout and let me know how you get on :)

[zero5uk]

Thanks again G

Ok, i had pretty much done everything you mentioned bar the full system check. Scan disk and defragging seems to have completed without any errors so i completed a full norton av check and no dodgy files either. It seems i have lost nearly 1.5 gig of space on my C drive for absolutley no reason i demand answers :p

maybe its something to do with virtual memory. Perhaps i should scan disk my D drive aswell to make sure.

oh and my housemates computer now seems to be working. a combination of chkdsc and reinstallating windows has done the trick, though he had to install the version that came with his computer as your copy (the 2002 home one) crashed at 22% completion, maybe its his dodgy machine i dont know but i think hes ok now and said to pass on his thanks to you for all your help

;)

[zero5uk]

Ok this is getting even more insane :o

Today i was just mucking about and after closing real one player (the new resource hogger version) and then deleting the shortcut to sim city which i uninstalled a week or so ago my 1.5 gig suddenly returned to my C drive just like that. It was either the sim city shortcut (how?) or it is the files in real one player, i wonder if the files in the history that have been deleted from the hard drive somehow interfere.

Im not sure what happened by i hope it remains like it is now.

[zero5uk]

Ok now im getting close.

after defragging the C and viewing the report, some files didnt fragment and they were all temp files of films i have downloaded, im guessing after deleting the films from my HD the temp files are still hanging around somewhere as apparently rather than being located in my shared folder (D drive where all my downloads and temp downloads are) they were in a different folder on the C drive, no idea why they should be mooching around over there. Also 2 of the 3 temp files causing the problem were not .avi's but instead .idx and the other was .psb im not sure if i even have the codec plug ins to play these formats.

what do u reckon G, have we cracked it ;)