Hard Drive Reaches Capacity Unexpectedly

[rrrssssss]

Hello forum,

My boss at work says his hard drive in his home PC filled up to capacity for no apparient reason. His hard drive had been about one third full for months and then the other day he noticed it was completely full when he didn't knowingly cause it to happen. He even had to uninstall some programs to make room for his usual computer work.

Would somebody please give me some reasons or possiblities why this is happening to his hard drive? His only recourse so far is to reformat and reinstall everything from scratch since he is not all that computer savey.

Your help would be appreciated by me and especially by him.

Thanks,
Roy

 

[sctakeshi]

It probably won't help you, but recently I had a similar problem. It was a corrupted System Restore point. I guess because some of the Restore points were corrupted, XP failed to delete ANY of them, and thus it EASILY overflowed its 1GB (or whatever) bounds, and just kept making more Restore points; it took up some 3GB (I looked in \System Volume Information) and I got a warning that my HDD was almost out of space. I disabled System Restore and all of the Restore points, corrupted or not, were deleted, so the problem was fixed.

 

[Ionizer86]

Also have him check for spyware (I heard sometimes hackers can use your PC's CPU or excess disk space after crawling in).

And search the entire disk for large files. Maybe a kid was downloading too many movies or games.

 

[NFactor]

Yes if he has XP look at the restore points, those things eat hard drive space like crazy.

 

[rrrssssss]

Hello,

Normally I would not be replying back to this thread but my boss wants me to thank Sctakeshi and the others for his advice because now my boss has cleared two thirds of his hard drive by deleting both MP3's and the accumulated restore points. He is very grateful for that so I am relaying the message from him here. So thanks.

Roy

 

[InlineFive]

That's what we are here for. Even though I didn't help on this one...

 

[Mday]

dont forget to check for temp files and stuff stored in temp directories.