Vista and my self absorbing HDD; A Tale of Cannibilism

DampCat

DampCat

DampCat

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Herro.

Right, something *really* weird is happening, and I cant see what, so i ask thee.

My story begins last night.

So I clicked on "Computer", right, so i could access some downloaded files, when i noticed a huge red bar representing the storage space on my 36gb Raptor than Vista is installed on. 1.32gb remaining, it said.

So i removed some programs that i'd inadvertantly installed on there (the idea was to only use the Raptor for Vista, then everything else is installed on the 160gb Sata drive) and cleared up some space. Now i had 1.9gb remaining. I couldn' seem to squeeze antying else out of it. Is Vista really that obese? 34gb? It can't be...

So anyway, i ran CCleaner, deleted some 700mb of temporary files and then checked the volume AGAIN, and it was down o 1.7gb remaining. Eh?

So i went to bed anyway, and when i got up this morning, i checked it and I have 400mb remaining.

Now. Nothing was downloading, nothign was installing, nothign was running. Not to that drive anyway, i left it on downloading some albums which go to the SATA drive without touching the Raptor at all.

Is there anything i can use, a program or something, that records the writes of a drive so that i can see what is swallowing the empty space? Seriously i went to sleep and lost over 1gb of storage whilst doing nothing.

What can i use to track what's going on? Anyone had anything like this before? I've been through Add/Remove programs and there's hardly anything left to remove from the C drive... yet still Vista is taking up circa 32gb. is that accurate? And why is it swallowing up free space even when i'm not at my PC?

:(
 
Depends on what version of Vista you have but a clean install takes around 15GB on average. A 36Gb drive is far too small in my opinion for Vista and a decent number of program, when you take into account the Hibernation file and that all optional features are present on the hard drive (hence when changing optional features the installation did isn't required). A good program to see how much space files are taking up is WinDirStat.
Also Service Pack 2 cuts down on a few Gigabytes by removing unused files. Check what system restore is up to aswell, also sounds like shadow copies is running frequently if you're losing space in such a short period of time.
 
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System restore allocation could be taking a fair amount of that space.

By default it steals 15% of your hdd (quite a shock when you've got 2x320GB Raid0 with Vista for the first time and you notice 90GB of space disappear)


Open command prompt, and chuck in "vssadmin list shadowstorage". This will show you the current shadowstorage volumes.

You can then resize them using "vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=300MB"

Obviously no quotes, and the maxsize can be whatever your hearts desires (must include the MB or GB after the amount).


Hope this helps. :)
 
Where have you set windows to assign virtual memory? I always tell it to use one of my larger drives as it takes up stupid amounts of your OS partition (usually at least 3gig).

Also, bit of a random one, but i recently had a problem similar to yours, turned out a friend of mine who i had a shared folder with in MSN had forgotten it was shared and was using it to store videos he had encoded for his mobile phone. Every file he added to it was being automatically downloaded by my computer and stored on C:. Ended up taking up nearly 10gig :/

I know it's not much help, but i very much recommend trying out the windows 7 beta. It's a big step up from vista for me and one of the main improvements is it seems to be less of a harddrive guzzling monster.
 
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Cheers guys, i'll give those a bash.

the 36gb is small, but it should contain *just* vista. With the exception of CCleaner and Defraggler, nothing else is installed on that drive. It's Vista Ultimate 64bit. Not sure if i have SP2 actually. I cant remember. Maybe i'll doubel check that later tonight.

System Restore is something i usually turn off, but i'll check that too.

Is the ShadowStorage command the allocation of storage for System Restore?

And RKO, will WinDirStat run over a given period of time and tell me what's written to that HDD in that period? If not, is there anything i can use that will do it? Im curious as to what swallows 1gb of storage when i'm not even at my PC and i havent left it doing anything. if i could find a program that would say like "2.20pm 900mb used for XXXX" or you know, something along those lines, it would be really useful.

cheers guys
 
Streeteh said:
Where have you set windows to assign virtual memory? I always tell it to use one of my larger drives as it takes up stupid amounts of your OS partition (usually at least 3gig).

Also, bit of a random one, but i recently had a problem similar to yours, turned out a friend of mine who i had a shared folder with in MSN had forgotten it was shared and was using it to store videos he had encoded for his mobile phone. Every file he added to it was being automatically downloaded by my computer and stored on C:. Ended up taking up nearly 10gig :/

I know it's not much help, but i very much recommend trying out the windows 7 beta. It's a big step up from vista for me and one of the main improvements is it seems to be less of a harddrive guzzling monster.
Click to expand...

Not sure on the virtual mem. I'll check that tonight. I can't remember setting that at all, to be honest, but i'll throw it on the sata if it's set. Do i need it? I've got 4gb RAM and the PC isn't slow.

No shared folders on my PC, although that's an interesting situation you had! :D Nothign too... compromising i hope ;)

Yeah I got a Win 7 RC .iso from technet the other day. Was going to throw it on my netbook to play around with. I don't enjoy replacing my whole PC as it's got so much stuff on there, but i guess if i can't clear this up i might have to!
 
WinDirStat won't run over a period of time unfortunately. It's mostly run ad hoc and displays a graphical list of all files on an HD, their location and what size they are. Unless it's been moved to another HD the hibernation file will most like be over 1GB. I'm guessing higher as the machine is 64bit.

Last time I installed a 64bit copy of Vista Ultimate it took about 18GB so fir the basic install itself you would have gone through half of your HDD. As for virtual memory, always keep it enabled irrespective of the amount of RAM in the machine. To my knowledge Windows and many program a do rely on it for proper running.
 
eXor i actually want to have your babies.

I searched and failed. My Search Fu is weak.

This. Is. Ridiculous. I actually hate windows. I hate it with every bone in my body.

Windows 7 doesn't suffer from this problem?
 
You know i have Ubuntu, you helped me Dual Boot it with XP ;)

I frigging love it, too. You know how my linux install went on my netbook?

I sweated and worried that nothing would work. I put NBR on a USB stick. Plugged it in. Turned it on. pressed install.

Ten minutes later it's done, and everything worked. Everything. No downloading drivers, no updating software, no removing OS components. It was just done.

If i could marry Ubuntu i would.
 
Yeah Hibernation file was 4gb, System Restore was on (lord knows how big) and also Pagefile (4gb) has been moved to the other HDD. Gonna grab SP2 now.
 
To be honest i have no issues with Vista. It's perfectly stable.. it just seems to be have executed so badly, and it's irritating that so much work has to be done to get it how it should be. Hence my comments earlier about Ubuntu.
 
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