"Found" 100GB

[Diablo]

Last night I downloaded some new drivers for my Xonar DX2 so I could play Oblivion in DX3D mode. It took a little while to get them working (deleting old drivers and reinstalling from safemode etc.) but it worked.

Then I though I would try Battlefield 2, as this was crashing when I asked for audio options or tried to play the game. Bad move, as it failed to start, then wouldn't uninstall. At this point I had 640GB free on my disk.

I deleted some BF2 related registry entries after backing up the registry, and it uninstalled fine and reinstalled.

Then I noticed I had 780GB free on my disc. All my programs still work as far as I can tell. I did notice a month back that I seemed to have eaten a lot of disc space but even so...

Any suggestions as to what has happened?

 

[zzhang]

Have you got system restor enabled? I know this can take alot of space but 100Gb is a fair bit.

 

[Diablo]

System restorre is enabled, but that is down at about (50GB) 5%, I might double check that at home though. Is it normal to delete huge chunks of system restore by editing the registry. Cheers tho, I think that might be the answer.

 

[Rastalovich]

Miscalculation of free disk space. A windows drive cleanup rectifies it. Windows doesn`t display free disk space in terms of how much is physically free, it relies on what files/folders tells it is being used and calculates it.

You can get occassions where windows will say there is zero free, when it`s not the case, it`s just in a big process of finding out.

 

[Diablo]

It wasn't a miss calculation, I ran disk cleanup about a week ago, and that turned up nothing and took 4.5 hours. I think it must be a system restore or Battlefield 2 corruption.

I know what you mean about miss calculation as in the first week I had somehow used 920GB (all of it) but after rebooting and checking the disc it found the space.

I suspect a corrupted system restore, but it could be a few things.

 

[SuB]

if this is something that has happened before? eg the whole disc used, reboot finds the rest.. i'd say that's a pretty serious issue, i can't say i've ever seen that happen to anything i've worked on?

it could be a temp directory but that is ALOT for temp files :S

 

[Diablo]

No, that was a different issue. Windows occasionally after prolonged disc activity, and when cpu usage is high fails to count the amount of space. Normally a refresh is what cures it.

This 100GB thing is a bit weird, so I might poke around sys restore, hibernate and page file to see what they have. (Yes I have a pagefile always unused for 16GB)

 

[nathan]

gremlins?

 

[Phoenix]

The dingo ate your drive space!

...it's your best bet.

 

[Diablo]

Nope, when I shook the drive, it turned out to be goblins that fell out. They get everywhere nowadays, fortunately they spat out the 100Gb before I kicked them out the door.

On a more seroius note, it looks like every time the game came to uninstall, it failed, and corrupted a bit of data, making it look used. When the registry entries went (I had a back up and looked) it seemed to get rid of the last vestiges of BF2 and that got rid of the corrupt bits. Still all is well, and my system restore is hunky dory (hopefully, it exists is all I know)

 

[Phoenix]

I still believe then dingo had something to do with it, but nice to see you sorted it out.