Loosing hard drive space on primary drive in Windows Vista

ajgoodfellow

ajgoodfellow

ajgoodfellow

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Joined
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Knowle, Solihull, UK
Hi

This has been happening gradually over some time but I have not been able to find out why.

Vista is installed on a 30GB system partition but as this is all that's installed on this partition I should have plenty of space

After moving all other files from the drive I managed to free up about 4.5GB of space (still not much!). This dropped to about 2.7GB within days with no obvious cause

I have installed SP2 but this made the situation worse. It reduced the free space to about 1.2GB and then failed due to limited hard drive space. On failure it did not release all of my available space. By removing temporary files and any application I could, I managed to free up some more space and tried again.

The update installed but reduced my available hard drive space to a mere 800MB and said I needed at least 2GB free.

I have moved all of the files from C:\Windows\System32\DriverStore\FileRepository to a backup folder on another partition. This freed up about 2GB leaving me with 2.8GB free. I installed SP2 and this left me with 2.5GB free - nearly 2GB less than I would have had with SP1 after I moved the files from FileRepository

I have switched off System Restore on the C: and moved the windows swap file to D:. Offline files is disabled and I have used Disk Cleanup to remove what it could and to delete all but the most recent restore point (both before and after turning off System Restore on C: ). Checkdisk returns no errors.

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution (which is where I am informed that the updates are downloaded to) only has 60MB of files.

I ran a batch file which clears out all various temp files and I have manually checked the usual culprits like the User temp and System temp folders

The batch file:

Code: 
echo Version 1.1
echo.
echo (C) 2007 My Digital Life (www.mydigitallife.info)
echo.
echo This batch script is provided as is without warranty.
pause 
echo.
echo.
echo Start cleaning and deleting Vista system junk? 
echo (Press Ctrl-C and answer Y to terminate)
pause
cls

del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.tmp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*._mp
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.log
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.gid
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.chk
del /f /s /q %systemdrive%\*.old
del /f /s /q "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\cookies\*.*"
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\*.*"
del /f /s /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp\*.*" 
del /f /s /q "%appdata%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\*.*"
del /f /s /q %windir%\*.bak
del /f /s /q %windir%\prefetch\*.*
del /f /s /q %windir%\SoftwareDistribution\Download\*.*
rd /s /q "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp\" & md "%userprofile%\Local Settings\Temp\" 
rd /s /q %windir%\Temp & md %windir%\Temp

cls
echo.
echo Windows Vista System Junk Cleaner
echo Version 1.1
echo.
echo (C) 2007 My Digital Life (www.mydigitallife.info)
echo.
echo This batch script is provided as is without warranty.
echo.
echo.
echo Vista system junk cleaning and deleting completed. 
echo.
echo Press any key to exit.
pause

I really am at my whits end!

The Windows folder totals 25.3GB!

I'm running Windows Vista Business 64-bit with SP2 and 4GB of ram. Any help would be really appreciated!
 
Tighten the hard drive space.

If that fails do a search for everything on C:\ and sort by descending order of file size. This should highlight any obvious culprits. ( Hibernation file, system restore points e.t.c. )

My Vista Ultimate partition is 20GB. A fresh install + SP2 takes up 8.6GB.
 
Thanks for the response - what do you mean by tighten the hard drive space? System Restore is set to 2GB maximum for D: and disabled on C:

This is the result of the vssadmin list shadowstorage command:

Code: 
C:\Users\Alistair>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
   For volume: (D:)\\?\Volume{6a8dc9c5-b9c3-11db-8966-806e6f6e6963}\
   Shadow Copy Storage volume: (D:)\\?\Volume{6a8dc9c5-b9c3-11db-8966-806e6f6e69
63}\
   Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.468 GB
   Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.72 GB
   Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.772 GB


C:\Users\Alistair>

I've disabled hibernation using the powercfg -H off command

Listing all files greater than 100MB on C: I have the following listed:

Thumbnails 114MB
6.0.6002.18005_0028c5a9_blobs.bin 342MB (located in Windows\winsxs\MainifestCache)
6.0.6001.18000_0028f81e_blobs.bin 392MB (located in Windows\winsxs\MainifestCache)
GraphicsCache.package 217MB (located in Users\Alistair\AppData\Roaming\Spore)
HomeSrWW.cab 137MB (located in C:\MSOCache\All Users\{91120000-002F-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}-C)
 
Just found that Google Chrome AppData is huge - well over 600MB!

C:\Users\Alistair\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome

This folder has the lion's share:

C:\Users\Alistair\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
 
Ah :o

Thought so at first but it has a cache folder within which is only 48MB

The Application folder is 115MB. The route of Chrome\User Data is 80MB

The Chrome\User Data\Default just consists of history indexes and thumbnails by the look of it

googlechromedirectory.jpg
 
What size is the winsxs folder, that's what causes the problems on my rig. If you install/deinstall/reinstall stuff then dlls get thrown into winsxs which causes it to grow.

If you do a google you'll find plenty of hits including a couple if threads on a Microsoft forum where their reply was hard disk space is cheap, get a bigger disk.
 
Seems there's not much you can do after looking around - most of the advise says to leave it alone!

Just looking at the folders modified today (when I installed SP2) gives a size of 4.3GB and 37,500 files
 
Well, you learn something new every day.

My former, three year old Win2KPro install has this directory. It's only 14MB in size, even though I installed a mountain of rubbish over the years. :D

Cheap hard drives is the reason for this ever increasing bloat? I'll have to keep an eye on the Vista incarnation. :eek:
 
Simplest solution is probably just to make the partition bigger using Disk Management. I have a 40GB Vista partition and 27GB is used, so your figures sound about right.
 
5.7Gb and 40,000 files on my Win7 RC1 laptop. That's after just under a month.

Edit: had a look and the vast majority seems to be AMD64 or x86 related.. since it's an Intel CPU and x64 OS, isn't that a bit odd? The majority of the rest was WOW64, which makes sense.
 
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This is most likely system restore. Seen it tons of times where new installs with 500GB disks and 400GB+ free can go down to 100GB free in a months use
 
The stupid thing about the winsxs folder is that it's there to avoid the old "dll hell" of old where an application would only run if it had a particular version of a dll it needed. The implementation of this in Vista is very extreme in that it will package up dlls for an app and save them away even if that dll is the same as 1 currently available to Windows and even if the same dll has already been saved away in the winsxs folder, hence the reason why it grows like a pig.

I had a go at trying to make some sense of the structure but gave up and took the easy route whereby I increased my Vista boot partition to 80gb.

Am also not sure if Microsoft have improved this in Windows 7.
 
I've noticed exactly the same thing happening to me. My Vista partition is 35 GB and even today it's gone from 4 GB free to 1 GB free. I'm sure it's only recently started doing this. I used to have a good 10 or more free.

EDIT: Just checked my winsxs folder. 15.5 GB :(
 
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Same problem here. I only have 100Gb of HDD space on my Laptop so I used a 20Gb partition for Vista and installed ONLY Vista on it.

I am CONSTANTLY running out of disk space! It's completely ridiculous.
 
[TW]Fox;14236552 said:
Same problem here. I only have 100Gb of HDD space on my Laptop so I used a 20Gb partition for Vista and installed ONLY Vista on it.

I am CONSTANTLY running out of disk space! It's completely ridiculous.
Click to expand...

For a drive that size I personally wouldn't have partitioned it into 2, does make rebuilds easier I know but I was constantly having to resize to give the OS partition more space.
 
Forgot to add in my ramblings above that the winsxs folder also has hard links to files which Windows Explorer doesn't deal with too well when reporting folder sizes. So some of the files are hard links to actual files in say C:\Windows.... but aren't physical copies in the winsxs folder but Explorer will report the size of that file when looking at folder properties for winsxs.
 
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