Disk Cleanup Wizard

[daniel m]

I ran the disk cleanup wizard the other night on my C drive. It scanned my C
drive as normal and then came up with results to clean, one of which was for
error reporting logs which wasnt ticked by default, but was apparently
99gigs worth!

I thought this was pretty interesting seeing as my C drive is only 32gig
big, so out of curiosity I ticked the box to cleanup the 99gig of logs, and
sat back and watched.

Everything seemed fine after it finished, but I rebooted to be sure and then
my wallpaper went missing. I went to set the wallpaper back to what it
was..... and noticed the file was missing. Then I checked the start menu,
all my programs have been removed! (example, powerdvd gone, alcohol 120
gone, winzip etc all gone and nothing working, not just removed from the
start menu, but also uninstalled from hdd)

Needless to say I was a little peeved. Ive used the disk cleanup wizard for
years without a problem and all of a sudden it thinks theres 99gigs worth of
temp+log files on a hdd thats 32gig big and starts removing applications Ive
installed myself!

Luckily I have all my backups on a hdd and was able to recover with a fresh
install of everything, but now I am too scared to use the cleanup wizard
incase it happpens again. Has anybody heard of somthing similar happening
before? I would love to know what went wrong to avoid it happening in the
future if possible.

I was running vista x64 when this occured, at the moment I have gone back to
x32 vista incase that has anything to do with it.

specs at the time of the problem
vista x64 ultimate
amd64x2 6000+
nvidia 8800gts
2gig ddr2 667
A 250gig sata partitioned to
C: 32gig for windows and a few smaller programs
E: 200gig for movies and applications
A 60gig IDE HDD is my D drive for backups

Vista x64 had just been completely updated from the Microsoft website in the
few days prior to the problem happening (I had only just installed vista x64
about a week earlier)

 

[Jane C]

Hello Daniel,

Do you have any 3rd party registry cleaning/optimizing products installed,
and if so, have you run them?

I have seen a few reports of this behaviour. There is a possibility that a
missing registry key could be the cause.

I have been running x64 versions of Vista for well over a year, and have not
had this happen when using disk cleanup.

 

[daniel m]

Gday Jane,

As a matter of fact I was trying out a program a couple of days earlier, it
was a demo of "Vista Manager x64" which is a cleaning/optimizing product.

From memory I ran nearly everything it offered (some things multiple times)
it sounds like I might steer clear of such optimizers in the future, live
and learn I guess.

Cheers for the reply, it puts my mind to rest about using disk cleanup and
heading back to x64 in the future

 

[Tracy H.]

Daniel,

I was trying to fix what I thought were performance issues last night and
did a disk cleanup wizard and the exact same thing happened to me. It deleted
all of my programs, documents, music, etc. I did a system restore but
unfortunately the thesis I was working on is gone. I don't think I'll be
using the wizard again either. Just wanted to let you know we were in the
same boat.

Tracy H.

 

[daniel m]

Gday Tracey,

Had you run some kind of optimiser product before you used the disk cleanup
also?
I think I will go back to letting firefox take care of my internet junk, and
pull out the old "del *.tmp /s" etc commands in a dos box for the rest. At
least Im sure of whats getting deleted then


Regards
Daniel