A
Andrew
The process "System" in the Task Manager on my Windows XP Pro SP2 (all
patched to date) will constantly eat disk space (I/O Write Bytes goes up
steadily) whenever I free up space on my C: drive... And clears up again
when I reboot...
Thurs, Oct 26th, I came in to work and my PC had a message saying my C:
drive space was low. Not thinking much of it, I moved an 8GB VM image I had
there over to my D: drive and carried on.
Around 1 or 2pm I got another message from windows saying my C: drive was
running low on space.(!) ... So now I'm trying to figure out what is eating
up space and moving another few GB of stuff over to D: ... and as I watch,
the C: drive space drops... Every few seconds I see it drop.
I use Treesize to try to find the directory or file being written to.. But
every time I move stuff off the C: drive, the total used space reported by
Treesize goes down... and then my hard drive fills up again, and the total
size reported by Treesize does *not* go up! (and yes.. I do have "Show
hidden files and folders" checked... and I do not have "Hide protected
operating system files" checked)
I got to a point where Treesize was indicating a total of about 40 GB used
on my 70GB C: drive - but the C: drive was *full* - no space available.
Trying to determin what was writing - All I could tell is that the process
"system" was writing the data - via I/O Write Bytes in task manager.
Sysinternals Process Explorer shed no more light on it, nor did filemon...
Filemond does not indicate any file being constantly written to... after
I'd disabled almost everything with autoruns, rebooted, and then stopped
every service that it would let me... There were maybe a dozen or less
processes running.. and only small periodic file access shown by filemon...
Yet the System process continued to write steadily.
Diskmon indicated data being written, but diskmon does not tell you what's
writing the data.
So I looked in my add/remove programs and in my Program Files folder and
tried to figure out everything I'd installed recently, and came up with the
list:
MS Power Shell
nncron
thinktecture - WSCF
VSWindowManager2005
CMAK
IE7
I couldn't find anything in add/remove programs for CMAK, so I renamed the
directory in Program Files... Then I uninstalled Power Shell, no change,
nncron, WSCF, VSwindowManager2005, then IE7... all no change, but the IE7
removal finally prompted me to reboot.
When I rebooted, and opened up the Task Manager... It was still eating up
space. I tried to do a bit of work (this is my work PC after all) before it
ate all my space... and I shortly noticed it had stopped writing at about
1.5GB or so... _stopped_!
Great! - What's the thing of those I wanted most... Power Shell... So it's
the first to go back... I re-install Power Shell, and reboot.. and...
wait.. and wait.. after it started getting up over 3GB written... I gave
up.
I un-installed Power Shell and re-booted.
And I wait... I'm waiting... I wrote this while I was waiting... It just
went up over 2GB
Argh.
Some time later I check back... It's up over 7GB... I can probably get away
with this... I just need to reboot every day to reclaim that 30GB and I'll
be good for another day or so.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated. I would also
prefer to figure out what it is rather than re-install or whatever. (I
don't seem to have any restore points before yesterday)
Thanks for reading...
Cheers
patched to date) will constantly eat disk space (I/O Write Bytes goes up
steadily) whenever I free up space on my C: drive... And clears up again
when I reboot...
Thurs, Oct 26th, I came in to work and my PC had a message saying my C:
drive space was low. Not thinking much of it, I moved an 8GB VM image I had
there over to my D: drive and carried on.
Around 1 or 2pm I got another message from windows saying my C: drive was
running low on space.(!) ... So now I'm trying to figure out what is eating
up space and moving another few GB of stuff over to D: ... and as I watch,
the C: drive space drops... Every few seconds I see it drop.
I use Treesize to try to find the directory or file being written to.. But
every time I move stuff off the C: drive, the total used space reported by
Treesize goes down... and then my hard drive fills up again, and the total
size reported by Treesize does *not* go up! (and yes.. I do have "Show
hidden files and folders" checked... and I do not have "Hide protected
operating system files" checked)
I got to a point where Treesize was indicating a total of about 40 GB used
on my 70GB C: drive - but the C: drive was *full* - no space available.
Trying to determin what was writing - All I could tell is that the process
"system" was writing the data - via I/O Write Bytes in task manager.
Sysinternals Process Explorer shed no more light on it, nor did filemon...
Filemond does not indicate any file being constantly written to... after
I'd disabled almost everything with autoruns, rebooted, and then stopped
every service that it would let me... There were maybe a dozen or less
processes running.. and only small periodic file access shown by filemon...
Yet the System process continued to write steadily.
Diskmon indicated data being written, but diskmon does not tell you what's
writing the data.
So I looked in my add/remove programs and in my Program Files folder and
tried to figure out everything I'd installed recently, and came up with the
list:
MS Power Shell
nncron
thinktecture - WSCF
VSWindowManager2005
CMAK
IE7
I couldn't find anything in add/remove programs for CMAK, so I renamed the
directory in Program Files... Then I uninstalled Power Shell, no change,
nncron, WSCF, VSwindowManager2005, then IE7... all no change, but the IE7
removal finally prompted me to reboot.
When I rebooted, and opened up the Task Manager... It was still eating up
space. I tried to do a bit of work (this is my work PC after all) before it
ate all my space... and I shortly noticed it had stopped writing at about
1.5GB or so... _stopped_!
Great! - What's the thing of those I wanted most... Power Shell... So it's
the first to go back... I re-install Power Shell, and reboot.. and...
wait.. and wait.. after it started getting up over 3GB written... I gave
up.
I un-installed Power Shell and re-booted.
And I wait... I'm waiting... I wrote this while I was waiting... It just
went up over 2GB
Argh.
Some time later I check back... It's up over 7GB... I can probably get away
with this... I just need to reboot every day to reclaim that 30GB and I'll
be good for another day or so.
Any thoughts or suggestions would be very much appreciated. I would also
prefer to figure out what it is rather than re-install or whatever. (I
don't seem to have any restore points before yesterday)
Thanks for reading...
Cheers