Disappearing Hard Drive Space

[YesUDont]

Good afternoon! Since 2 days ago, my hard drive space slowly depletes to 0mb no matter what I remove.

I'm aware there is a thread discussing this issue here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/246598-45-disappearing-hard-drive-space

The difference between this user and I is I am not, nor was I ever on a network. I tried to reduce the paging file size by about 200mb to see if that made any difference and it did not.

It turned out the original poster to the thread I linked to had files that were self duplicating thousands of times. I have many files and folders on my computer, so I don't know how to go about finding duplicates. There's a way to view recently opened documents, but is there a way to view all recently created documents?

I'm also suspicious this might not be my specific problem because this morning I've noticed my pop up and ad blocker for Firefox doesn't work anymore, although this may be a separate issue.

I've considered defragmenting, running chkdsk and posting a hijackthis log, but I'm not sure what order to do it in.

Any advice would be helpful! Thanks!

 

[kenrivers]

One way to check for duplicate files is to do a search for a particular file or folder and see how many times it shows up. You can narrow the search by choosing to search by date (or a range of dates). Have you run a virus scan? If not, I would do that first follwed by hijackthis. You would follow this up with chkdsk /f (the /f is the switch to make repairs). Defragmenting probably won't help until you get to the root cause of the problem and then it will only defragment the hard drive. You have to have a certain percentage of the HDD space free before defragmenting will work.

 

[Hawkeye22]

Run a virus scan first. Restore points can use a lot of space. Run "disk cleanup" and on the advanced tab, use the option to delete all but the last restore point. Just be sure you won't need to restore beyond a day before doing this. Also, if you don't use hibernation, disable the feature. This will cause it to delete the hiberfil.sys hidden file that is used for hibernation.

 

[YesUDont]

Thanks for the help, everyone! I solved the problem.

I ran a virus scan and it stopped at about 97% completion and didn't fix it.

Then I ran chkdsk on (C:\) and that didn't fix it either. I was about to run it on (F:\) as suggested, but I figured I might as well run a search on all documents modified within the last week.

I discovered a .txt document called toolbar_log.txt and it was 6 gigabytes. I looked it up and it was my antivirus's toolbar (which is AVG) that was the culprit! Apparently this is a glitch the AVG team still hasn't been able to fix and it's very common! Although I don't know why it only just happened recently. It could be that the toolbar installed itself when I updated Firefox.

So I uninstalled the toolbar (which actually wasn't easy, it kept asking me to open Internet Explorer) and if the log pops up again will make it read only which everyone says does the trick.

Sorry if that was too long winded, just trying to include as much information as I can just in case anyone else experiences this problem!

Thanks a lot and have a great day!