Hard drive mysteriously loses 70 gigs

Ultimanecat

Hey guys, I'm posting this question in this forum since H+A doesn't always seem to be very helpful for pure computer questions.

I run a program called Eraser, which is basically a file shredder / eraser. Anyways, I set it to erase the contents of my recycle bin earlier (with maybe around 20 mb of stuff in it), and the program began to hang. Within a few seconds, even Vista was starting to hang, and that's when I realized that the hard drive was being written to ferociously.

I tried to shutdown the computer normally, but Windows was pretty much borked at this point, so I manually powered down. Now, upon booting, over 70 GB of hard drive space is gone and unaccounted for. Windows recognizes that this space is occupied, but it doesn't seem to exist in any actual file that I can access.

I've run WinDirStat with no luck - anybody have any ideas where Eraser was writing to? The recycle bin is empty according to Windows, but I'm not sure how to get directly in there and see if the problem is there.

Erchamion

Try SpaceMonger. http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/

Firebrand

System Restore and shadow copies can claim as much as 15% drive space by default. To check the current usage on Vista (don't know if this is what you're using):

1. Open up a command prompt in admin mode (type cmd in the Start->search field, rightclick the program that pops up and choose Run as administrator).
2. To check current usage, enter:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

3. To change the max space used for system restore points:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=xxGB

I believe there's also an option to clean out the current files from there using the Disk Cleanup utility.

I had a similar problem myself with missing disk space a while back, and it turned out SR had eaten up 140 gigabytes.

Ultimanecat

I did check on the System Restore, but the affected disk (actually a partition) is not the System disk, and all the same I cleared out the restore points with Disk Cleanup.

I'll try that SpaceMonger software, but I've already tried quite a few programs and none are helping out (they'll report something like 93 GB are being taken up by reported files, but 176 GB are actually being used).

Right now I'm copying everything on the drive over to an external hard drive and I'll probably reformat if I haven't figured out anything else by then.

edit: Spacemonger is reporting the 79 GB or so being taken up but says it cannot scan it...and it definitely isn't in the System Volume Information or $RECYCLE.BIN folders, or at least Windows doesn't think it is.

bowen

It's probably going to require a format. Something seems like it removed the file by cleaning sectors of the disk, but windows thinks the file is still there.

If I may ask, what is the point of using eraser? Unless you're planning on giving your top secret hard drive to the salvation army or something, it's a bit of overkill beyond the "Delete, Remove from Recycle bin" route, and doesn't really offer any advantages speed wise. And unless you're a top secret government worker, I'm pretty sure no one's interested in your word document for history 101 or whatever.

Scandisk and defrag may restore the space.

citizen059

This is from http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/faq - don't know if it'll help or not, but...

Q: "After running Eraser the free space on my drive was lost or reduced noticeably. How can I fix this?"

A: It could be that either Eraser was terminated abnormally or the system crashed causing the temporary files not to be removed. You can remove the folder "~ERAFSWD.TMP" and all the files in it to reclaim the disk space (open command prompt and type "deltree X:\~ERAFSWD.TMP", where X is the drive letter).

If your drive is compressed (with third-party compression software) and you did not turn off the cluster tip erasing, you must recompress the drive to restore the lost space – next time, do not use cluster tip erasing on compressed drives.



(Whether or not this works may depend on your version)

Ultimanecat

citizen059 wrote: »

This is from http://www.tolvanen.com/eraser/faq - don't know if it'll help or not, but...

Q: "After running Eraser the free space on my drive was lost or reduced noticeably. How can I fix this?"

A: It could be that either Eraser was terminated abnormally or the system crashed causing the temporary files not to be removed. You can remove the folder "~ERAFSWD.TMP" and all the files in it to reclaim the disk space (open command prompt and type "deltree X:\~ERAFSWD.TMP", where X is the drive letter).

If your drive is compressed (with third-party compression software) and you did not turn off the cluster tip erasing, you must recompress the drive to restore the lost space – next time, do not use cluster tip erasing on compressed drives.



(Whether or not this works may depend on your version)

Thanks, never saw this...unfortunately I never saw anything like a .tmp file, and like I said earlier, SpaceMonger reported that that portion of the drive was "unscannable".

I ended up copying everything to an external HD and quick formatting the drive. So far so good, I just hope it doesn't screw up anything in the registry or otherwise that refers to that drive.

As for why I'm using it - I started futzing around with it a month or so back after buying said external HD used. I kind of doubt the previous owner wiped it before selling it, so I did so myself just to make sure nothing I didn't want would be left on it. After that I just kind of stuck with it...after this I probably won't bother any more, though.