Hard Disk Full (with what?)

I'm trying to help out a friend with a Dell Dimension desktop running Windows ME. The hard drive is 10 Gb and is nearly full. All large files in 'My Documents' have been removed (burned to CD), All unused programs have been uninstalled (and there are only MS office suite, Adobe photo editor, CD labeling software and a few other applications installed). Yet the hard drive remains perilously full. I know Windows itself takes up quite a bit of room but not 3/4 of the drive. Can anyone provide some clues where to look for space hogs?

 

**** SYSTEM RESTORE ??? ****

Does your friend remember the attractive mom calmly repairing system damage done by her keyboard-pounding infant, as portrayed in the WinME intro video?

She was using System Restore.

It's a contrivance that in theory saves snapshots of the system configuration in a hidden folder, usually called "_RESTORE" on C:\ , allowing users to effect a step-back to an earlier state.

In my experience,

1) it just does not work reliably

2) amasses vast amounts of useless curd.

I am one of those who repeatedly found several GB of junk in that folder, although System Restore claimed it did not have ANY restore points available.

Suggestion:

First check that System Restore is enabled. If it is...

a) Open the file manager (Explorer)

b) Go tools -> folder options -> view and enable viewing hidden files and folders

c) go to C:\_restore , check the amount of files contained there, and if that's the problem remorselessly all the junk therein contained.

You may want to play with the System Restore settings, to limit the amount of drivespace devoted to its hidden cache.

I limited it to zero - I disabled System, Restore altogether.

Not only is the implementation very poor, it is also conceptually wrong, as it is based on a FIFO scheme: first restore point saved will be dumped first.

The result is that the progressive decay of Windows will gradually be reflected in all restore points. When the system breaks, you can't go back to a "clean" state, only to a comparatively "cleaner" one.

I use Linux to save a complete copy of the WinME system, at a point I select, with all the applications and settings I like. So when I have to go back I return to a clean system, I reinstall all the last new applications, test it for a few days, and only then freeze it again.

Microsoft, not users, should have come up with that!

 

Thank you so much for the response Filippo. The system restore certainly sounds like the culprit. I'll let you know how it works out.

 

Hard Drive Full (with what?)

I did dump everything in the C:\_RESTORE directory but it was only a few hundred MB worth of stuff. I went in and also elimiated some windows components that he never uses too but the (10 Gb) hard drive is still about 90% full. How much space should a typical windows installation and MS 'Works' suite take up? It's hard to imagine that the operating system and basic applications take up half the drive?

 

I would run the Standard Scandisk, as your Free Disk Space, may be misreported or have Lost File Clusters. Look at C:\ in Windows Explorer, and delete any Chk files. Scandisk will convert Lost File Clusters to this file type, if not set to Free under Advanced in Scandisk.

 

Good call markp62!

An extra thought: did anyone ever see the swap file automatically swell to huge proportions, in response to a program malfunctioning and barfing data to the point of filling up the ram?

Just in case: boot with a diskette and check with the DIR command how big is the file win386.swp in c:\windows.

c:\windows> dir win386.swp

If it's big, erase it.

c:\windows> erase win386.swp

Windows will rebuild it. I manually set mine to 500MB+, but I know I did so.

 

AS a reference point:

My whole WinME + about 100 applications use right over 3GB.

The Windows folder alone is over 1.3GB.

Within it, Options contains a copy of all the Windows install files, for about 160MB.


May I suggest you draft a ranking of the biggest folders?
(Remember to make all files visible, so you can find the culprits)

Usual suspect folders:

- Windows

and within Windows:
- temp
- temporary internet folders
Both of which could technically ballooon to no limit, depending on a number of settings and OS problems.

- application data (which may be inside a user's profile - do a search for "application" folders)
There are several programs that use caches of their own. Just one of them can generate tons of junk in tis folder. be patient and keep digging.

Suggestion: if you did a lot of burning or audio/video editing, some sw may have generated several images of CD's, each in the many 100's of MB, and other large chunks of multimedia files, perhaps not much compressed. You may have never seen them in their out-of-the-way nooks. Did you burn lots of Linux CDs recently?

Finally: Mail software - check if your Outlook (.pst) or Outlook Express (.dbx) files are reasonably small.

- Program Files

and within that:
- MS Office (mine is 2k standard, 135MB, but a full Professional can be much bigger)
- MS Works - just the clipart collection can be 100s of MB
- OpenOffice 240 MB.

 

Hard drive full (with what?)

Thanks very much for the additional suggestions guys. I have gotten rid of the temp internet files but had not tried scan disk. E-mail has been emptied too. I think the file size ranking is a good idea to start. Although my friend has burned a some CD's, they were mostly just jpegs and the occasional music CD (no Linux). I'll post back the results. Thanks again.