something is eating my hard drive
Community Forums/General Help/something is eating my hard drive
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| yesterday all of a sudden my laptop pops up and says hard drive space is getting very low. There should've been around 80gb of 284 gb on there but it went down to 0. I uninstalled a ton of games and apps and got my hd space back to 160 gb. But today it is steadily dwindling. Down to 98gb from 160 then down to 92 gb in the space of 10 minutes and now it's down to 46gb. That's a huge loss in one day and I haven't downloaded or added anything. I tried runnig a thing called ccleaner but it doesn't help. Any ideas of what is eating my hard drive? The hd light is on continuosly and it's like I have to get in sideways to run any program. Slow starting and glitchy. Thank you. DOG |
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| Open task manager and see what application or process is busy, might give you an idea of what is accessing the drive. |
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| You can also use "Procmon" from sysinternals (free), which among others will show you all file system activity: read/write attempts by any program, including what filenames. It also shows all windows registry activity: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx |
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| I'm betting it's a virus |
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| You can observe process-specific read/write traffic in the taskmanager. That should uncover the thief. |
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| To clarify, open taskmanager click the performance tab then then resource monitor button. Select disk to see what is accessing your drive. |
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| pagefile.sys seems to be doing the most access. I've also been keeping an eye on windows tmp files and deleting them. I found a 20 gb tmp file in there yesterday. After rebooting this morning I have 118gb avail so it looks like there's tmp files being written and removed... also a thing called ntfs volume log...It's weird because it varies so much but nonetheless even if I have 120gb today where did the other 40 gb go to? Thanks for your replies. |
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| Found the culprit. A program called NCHSwiftSound. It apparently is making recordings of who knows what and storing them in a folder in C:\Program Data. I deleted the temp folder and now I'm back at 160gb. It's some shareware program I found who knows where but DO NOT install any programs from NCH. It doesn't have an unins program nor does it show up in control panel add/remove nor can i delete the program since it says it is in use. Any ideas how to remove a program like that? |
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| Spybot had a program uninstaller. Have you tried that? |
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| Maybe ist that automatic backup thing in Windows. Use to drain my laptop until I erased it. |
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| Try booting in safe mode and zapping it, or enter msconfig in the Run window and unchecking it in the startup tab, if it's listed there. |
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| Also, if all the above fails, try downloading a File Assassin program. That will let you delete the files, even if they are in use. |
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| I got rid of it. Thanks for all the help. I hate crap like that. I suggest to avoid all NCH products. |
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| Hi Doggie, glad you got it sorted. I only just saw this thread and thought is this the same people that make that Zulu DJing software stuff? If so, I agree. They're very very bad (not I suppose illegal, or directly damaging, but hugely annoying and certainly inconvenient). Their programs Install a bunch of adware too and also did not fully uninstall through standard means (i.e. Add/Remove programs) In my opinion, I would recommend folks steer WELL clear of this NCH and their products. |
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