Difficult Puzzle: HD fills up 'spontaneously'

[JHP]

First my great thanks to the many members of this great forum who first have helped me make an informed decision for a T42 FVU, and then helped me understand this great machine better. Yet at the moment I am clueless as to the machine's behavior, and I do not believe anyone has mentioned it before.

After a reboot the hard drive (the original 40 GB), which has about 11 GB left will start to fill up, until all the free space is gone. While this takes a while - a couple of days - at some point there will not be any space left and the machine informs me that the HD is out of free space. After a reboot the original 11 GB of free space magically reappears, but short of a reboot nothing else I do will reclaim the free space.

I am at a loss understanding this process. It occurs since about 2 months. I have had the machine for 8 months and have installed the regular stuff and the occasional handy shareware utilities, but nothing exotic or obviously risky (no games, no P2P stuff). My impression is that this mysterious process is most intense when the machine is idle, but nothing obvious shows up in taskmanager or in the start up routines. As far as I know I have turned of all automatic Windows indexing and recovery services. (At some point I did try out Google's new desktop search, but I have long uninstalled it because it wasn't particularly useful). Some kind of virus or worm could account for this behavior, but I run an up to date McAfee virus scan, and any spyware scanner I throw at it comes up clean.

The obvious thing to do is to reinstall everything from scratch, but I do not have the time at the moment to do this, especially since it involves figuring out how to reinstall all the IBM preloaded stuff. Thus my question, has anyone seen this kind of behavior before, or have an idea what might cause it?

The machine has 768 MB of RAM installed, and runs Windows XP SP2. The swapfile is set to zero.

[JHEM]

I think the problem is that your swapfile is set to zero!

Try this instead, in Windows XP, click Start, right-click My Computer, and select Properties. Click the Advanced tab. In the Performance box, click Settings. Choose the Performance Options box's Advanced tab, and in the 'Virtual memory' box, click Change. Select Custom size and enter 384 for both the initial size and the maximum size. Choose Set, and then click OK three times.

Regards,

James

[Daniel]

Have you ran bootvis lately? If yes, that could be the culprit as well.

[sugo]

edit

[JHP]

Thanks JHEM and Daniel. I do not believe that the problem is caused by the swapfile settings. Although I have changed them, the problem seems to continue. Also, I have used these virtual memory settings for many months before the problem started. I have run bootvis in the past - don't know exactly when. Daniel, how would bootvis cause this problem, and how do I stop it?

[Leon]

If Bootvis is not ended or terminated properly, it will continue to make huge log files and eat up your hard drive. Either start Bootvis and select Trace>Stop Tracing OR if you have uninstalled Bootvis (it can/will keep tracing even if uninstalled), reinstall it, and then execute Trace>Stop Tracing.

[none]

Well if you suspect a virus or worm, I would deffinetely try another virus scanner... McAfee is pretty good, but they're all only as good as contraceptives -- 99% effective at most Avast is a personal favorite of mine, I don't trust Norton since version 2004 and up... You can actually even run an online one at www.trendmicro.com, the online one won't conflict with the current one on your drive, so saves you installing and uninstalling stuff...

But anyway, I would take a different approach to finding where your problem is. Wait until the drive is getting full up, then open Explorer, and go to Tools > Folder Options > View, and make sure Hide protected operating system files is OFF, and Show hidden files is ON. Then just run a search on your hard drive for large files. Doesn't have to be 11GB, even a search for files 500MB+ should return only a handful of results, if any, besides the swap file.. Once you find the large file, as they say, Google is your friend -- You can find out what program creates it, and known issues with it.

Of course if your "offender" is creating 10,000 1MB files instead of one large one, it may be harder to find. You may have to resort to folder elimination process, starting with your root folder ( C:\ ), with the old Right Click-Properties. Good luck with it

[Darkfire01]

if your company installed symantec anti-virus on ur computer that might be ur culprit. i had this problem with a network i was working on. a specific version of symantec fills up the hd with 1 gigantic log file.

[JHP]

It appears that bootvis was the culprit. After starting the program and closing it properly the free space remains constant. This has been a great help. Thanks all for your input and Daniel & Leon for making the right suggestion