Thread: HDD becomes completely "allocated"

Anyone have any ideas what's going on here? I have seen two computers now with completely full-up HDDs - most recently an eMachine WinXP, of which I have just reformatted and reinstalled the OS. The HDD was about 1/4 full. Then, I did a WU, which added all the .NET Framework SPs and a few security updates, and all of a sudden the whole entire balance of the free space is now "allocated". How the heck did this happen? Now I have to start all over! grrrrrr.....

Anyone else ever have this problem?

Usually a kind of worm or trojan can do this. Seeing that you've reformatted and reinstalled Windows it doesn't seem likely. I've never seen this before after a format.
Have a look at this tool it might be useful if only to show what's filling the HDD; http://windirstat.info/

Originally Posted by ₣abler

Usually a kind of worm or trojan can do this. Seeing that you've reformatted and reinstalled Windows it doesn't seem likely. I've never seen this before after a format.
Have a look at this tool it might be useful if only to show what's filling the HDD; http://windirstat.info/

Thanks Fabler, I'll have a look at that.

Hey Fabler. I finally got around to trying that program - SUPER! Now I have another question - the suspect taking up all the hard drive space is

C:\$clean_temp\tmp0001 thru tmp0015 (no file extension).

Could this be something related to Comodo Firewall? There's only a 40gig HDD in this thing and these temp files are taking up 29gig! They were last modified on the 13th Feb - think I can just delete them?
Thanks!

Can't find if these temp files are to do with Comodo. Sometimes temp files come with "~" symbol as a prefix.
I'd run Ccleaner; http://www.ccleaner.com/ and see what it cleans.
As for Comodo firewall , used it from the beginning but dropped it as it's become bloated in my humble opinion. PCTools firewall plus is what I use now.

Originally Posted by ₣abler

Can't find if these temp files are to do with Comodo. Sometimes temp files come with "~" symbol as a prefix.
I'd run Ccleaner; http://www.ccleaner.com/ and see what it cleans.
As for Comodo firewall , used it from the beginning but dropped it as it's become bloated in my humble opinion. PCTools firewall plus is what I use now.

Yes, I had run Ccleaner and it hadn't found these. (No, there was no tilda in the prefix of these 15 files.) That's why the windirstart worked so well! The only other thing I can think of is, maybe they had something to do with the File Shredder - I had tried to clean the unused HDD space and it failed several times. That's when I realized there was no free space on the drive. I don't know, I've never seen this before on a freshly formatted OS install.

Well, I may have to check out PCTools firewall plus on the next system I recycle. Thanks again for your help Fabler.

Have you tried deleting these files via WinDirStat? If they are only temp files I'm guessing it shouldn't do any harm. Only guessing though! If they build up again then there's a program installed that's doing it.

Originally Posted by ₣abler

Have you tried deleting these files via WinDirStat? If they are only temp files I'm guessing it shouldn't do any harm. Only guessing though! If they build up again then there's a program installed that's doing it.

Well, WinDirStat showed me where they were, so I just deleted them manually, then dumped the recycle bin.. I'll check after a few bootups to see if any program keeps creating any more. The only thing I can think of is, maybe the failures from the shredder program did it. Maybe I'll run that one more time and see if they appear again - but if the program doesn't fail (which it didn't last time I ran it), then I may never know what did it. But the problem appears to be resolved, so I'm happy for that! Thanks again.

Glad it's sorted (fingers crossed)...