Help.. Running out of hard drive room

[Darrell S]

This morning I took my son's advice and used the Consolidate feature of
iTunes to copy my songs just for iTunes so it could always find them. It
just wouldn't stop. It filled up my hard drive. I have a 80GB internal
hard drive, use WinXP Home, and it normally works fine.

I couldn't even get Windows to load so I used the Safe Mode to delete some
stuff to make room for a normal boot. I rebooted in normal mode and moved
over 11GB of mp3s to my external hard drive. Somehow it only gave me around
8GB empty space. I tried moving my Art folder (about 1.5GB) to my external
drive but it hung up on a file "FW_FW_Bill Gates tribute...". It was of 0
size and wouldn't delete. I was finally able to manually copy that folder
minus "FW_FW_Bill Gates tribute...". to my external drive and in DOS was
able to use remdir/s/q to delete the entire folder on my hard drive. But
that didn't increase my useable internal hard drive space.

I have manually gone through Explorer trying to find too large folders to
delete them but they all seem rather normal.
I have used Properties to monitor my hard drive space and it has
progressively reduce the free space at about 500MB/hour.
My Norton virus scan shows no viruses present.

Help!!

 

[Darrell S]

AS an add-on. I used Add/Remove to remove iTunes from my hard drive to see
if that would help. Didn't. I used Windows Tools, Disk Clean-up to no
avail. Right now I'm down to 6GB free space on my 80GB internal hard drive
and I'm going to shut off my computer and wait for an answer. I seem to
systematically be losing free space with it on.

 

[sdlomi2]

AS an add-on. I used Add/Remove to remove iTunes from my hard drive to
see if that would help. Didn't. I used Windows Tools, Disk Clean-up to
no avail. Right now I'm down to 6GB free space on my 80GB internal hard
drive and I'm going to shut off my computer and wait for an answer. I
seem to systematically be losing free space with it on.

Have you done a system search for a couple of your tune-names to see if
there are multiple copies of all your tunes on your hd? Luck, s

 

[Paul Mckenna]

Hi,

If you hard disk space is still going down you could try running the filemon
util from sysinternals to get some idea what files are being
accessed/written it might give us more of a clue to whats going on.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/filemon.mspx

If everything had calmed down and now you just have no space try running:
chkdsk /f
I've had windows misreporting the free space before but normally telling me
i have more space than i do.



Regards
Paul Mckenna

 

[Lem]

This morning I took my son's advice and used the Consolidate feature of
iTunes to copy my songs just for iTunes so it could always find them. It
just wouldn't stop. It filled up my hard drive. I have a 80GB internal
hard drive, use WinXP Home, and it normally works fine.

I couldn't even get Windows to load so I used the Safe Mode to delete some
stuff to make room for a normal boot. I rebooted in normal mode and moved
over 11GB of mp3s to my external hard drive. Somehow it only gave me around
8GB empty space. I tried moving my Art folder (about 1.5GB) to my external
drive but it hung up on a file "FW_FW_Bill Gates tribute...". It was of 0
size and wouldn't delete. I was finally able to manually copy that folder
minus "FW_FW_Bill Gates tribute...". to my external drive and in DOS was
able to use remdir/s/q to delete the entire folder on my hard drive. But
that didn't increase my useable internal hard drive space.

I have manually gone through Explorer trying to find too large folders to
delete them but they all seem rather normal.
I have used Properties to monitor my hard drive space and it has
progressively reduce the free space at about 500MB/hour.
My Norton virus scan shows no viruses present.

Help!!

When you used DiskCleanup, did you choose the option to delete all but
the most recent System Restore point? Do you have Zone Alarm? I don't
know if this has been fixed, but as of last June there was a bug in ZA
that caused SR points to grow (and grow ...)
http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=gen&message.id=34871

When you searched for large folders, did you include system and hidden
folders in your search? You should, and if you find that that's where
the problem is, post back with name(s) of the large files and/or folders
and someone will be able to give you more focused help.

 

[Darrell S]

@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:[email protected]...

When you used DiskCleanup, did you choose the option to delete all but the
most recent System Restore point? Do you have Zone Alarm? I don't know if
this has been fixed, but as of last June there was a bug in ZA that caused
SR points to grow (and grow ...)
http://forum.zonelabs.org/zonelabs/board/message?board.id=gen&message.id=34871

When you searched for large folders, did you include system and hidden
folders in your search? You should, and if you find that that's where the
problem is, post back with name(s) of the large files and/or folders and
someone will be able to give you more focused help.

I'll try that delete System Restore Point. Don't have Zone Alarm but do
have Rollback RX Pro. If I can't find otherwise I'll try removing it. If
push comes to shove I ;have Drive Image 7 that I can boot to the CD and use
my backup on my external hard drive to re-write my hard drive. If that
doesn't work my last shot will be to reformat and then use DI 7 to re-write
stuff. My last image was 11-13-06 but I can copy more recent stuff to my
external hard drive. ;

 

[Lem]

@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:[email protected]...
I'll try that delete System Restore Point. Don't have Zone Alarm but do
have Rollback RX Pro. If I can't find otherwise I'll try removing it. If
push comes to shove I ;have Drive Image 7 that I can boot to the CD and use
my backup on my external hard drive to re-write my hard drive. If that
doesn't work my last shot will be to reformat and then use DI 7 to re-write
stuff. My last image was 11-13-06 but I can copy more recent stuff to my
external hard drive. ;

I don't know anything about Rollback Rx Pro, but any application that
claims to provide a "snapshot of the entire system and data" would seem
to have the potential to create large files. If you are also using
Windows System Restore, you may get into a recursive situation where you
are backing up backups of backups, etc., especially if you are creating
the snapshot on the same drive you are protecting.

You might want to check with Horizon DataSys support for Rollback Rx.

 

[Lem]

I don't know anything about Rollback Rx Pro, but any application that
claims to provide a "snapshot of the entire system and data" would seem
to have the potential to create large files. If you are also using
Windows System Restore, you may get into a recursive situation where you
are backing up backups of backups, etc., especially if you are creating
the snapshot on the same drive you are protecting.

You might want to check with Horizon DataSys support for Rollback Rx.

And just so I don't lose sight of what apparently started your problem,
just how big is your iTunes library now? And it's a silly question, but
after you moved the various files to your external drive, did you run
Disk Cleanup again? You might want to head over to the iTunes forums
and ask there if "consolidation" is known to cause the kind of problem
you seem to have. http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=149
Note: "A 'Consolidate' via iTunes will copy your known Library to the
new folder you designate. Copy - not move. This is an important
distinction."
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=1731107&#1731107

 

[Guest]

hello... i had a problem simular to yours at one time... I down loaded
www.treesize.com and it showed me exactly where the "large" files were
that were filling up my 80 G hard drive......
....... just an idea )...............it helped me out....
it narrowed my search down to "zone alarm".. which i had at that time.. but
some glitch with zone alarm DID fill up my hard drive, and like i said, with
"treesize" it showed me what and where the files were that were growing.