Hard Disk Storage - Strange Problem

Update: I deleted my system restore points, and now my hard drive is back up another almost 150GB. I am not sure if they restore points were the actual problem, or perhaps deleting them triggered a reassessment on the part of the hard drive, but I'm not really worried about it anymore. I am now back to using 131 GB of my hard drive.

Hi Drown. I just thought i'd say that system restore can build up HUUGE files over a short space of time and it's always a good idea to look over your SR settings etc.

I have 3x WD 500GB drives partitioned into 8 drives, so space is never really an issue.. but I left system restore running on all drives recently when I had re-installed XP and when I came to delete all restore points (which I do from time to time) all together the drives were using close to 35GB put together.

All drives were set to unlimated space to be used for system restore. So I quickly changed this to only the system disk being monitored (as all other disks are just data and storage) and I've limited that to only 5GB so it can't ever over do it.

It sounds like the reason PKZIP was having troubles was the size of the file, and was leaving .temp files (or something like that) each time it tried to unpack.. obviously taking up huge amounts of disk space each time you tried.

If you look in your temp folder and delete all thats there (nothing important can be deleted from the temp folder) and also look into program files > pkzip (or where ever you installed it) and make sure there isn't any temp files sitting around.

I used an unpacker a while ago that did the same thing, and if you ever cancelled the process mid-way, it would leave huge uncompressed (and hidden) temp files on my desktop.

Hope that helps a little anyway, it's always a good idea to do a disk clean up and run a few scans with ccleaner or programs like that to make sure your HDD's and registry are running properly without wasted space.