Strange disk space problem

[k++]

My flatmate has an 18Gb hard drive in his laptop. Lately a very strange thing has been happening.

He rebooted his computer, and all of a sudden his 300+ MB ofy free space became 29MB. He virus scanned the computer, moved some files onto his USB drive and rebooted. he now had 200+ MB of space free. once rebooted, ho has only 29MB free

I disable system restore, reboot. nothing changes.

I move some more files, he now has 400MB free space, I reboot and guess what. only 29MB free space.

I can no longer return the files to the original location

I really have no idea what's going on

any help much appreciated

regards

Karl

 

[Ry@n]

Backup date, reload operating system ?

 

[Al Vallario]

Have you tried clearing the recycle bin + defragging?

 

[k++]

Thanks but neither solution has any hope of working. free space is disapearing at reboot to 29MB regardless of how much space was available before rebooting.

Anybody got any ideas

cheers

Karl

 

[Jonny69]

First do a chkdsk.

NTFS lets you 'hide' a portion of a file as hidden data. Normally it's used as encryption data for private files but it can be used to hide massive amounts of data to clog up a system. Might be worth a scan through with a different virus checker like AVG then Spybot, Adaware and HijackThis which should pick up anything like this.

 

[k++]

did check disk yesterday, can,t remember what exacrtly it encountered bet if I turn on "allow the view of hidden system files" the C: druve has lots of folders named Found.00 etc etc and thy add up to 9GB+

Will tyr different scanners

thanks

Karl