T42 loses space on hard drive after every reboot!

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dcdomain · #1 Post by **dcdomain** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 9:54 am

I consider myself pretty knowledgable about computers and keep my systems clean (spyware, antivirus programs, everythings always up to date).

I'm stumped. This started maybe about a month ago, soon after I had my ThinkPad sent in for a system board failure. Anyway the only way I can explain this is that I'll be working on a project... say in Photoshop and I'll run out of space for the ram drive. Usually the easy fix is the reboot and start fresh. However whenever I reboot now the space available stays the same or actually DWINDLES. Even if I go into the system and delete some files to free up space. I'm not downloading anything and everytime I delete a large file, within a few days that extra space will be eaten up.

Totally stumped here, I have System Restore off. I don't know what else could be taking up the space. The only thing I thought of was maybe the system hibernation... perhaps that was eating up space?

I just turned it off and hopefully I won't have anything eating space up... but if anyone else has ideas please let me know. I'm tempted to just format everything but saving data is a pain.

Can someone move this to the Windows OS forum? Problem probably not very related to the T series.

Edited by Moderator: Please review the posting guidelines about profanity in subject lines.

dokein · #2 Post by **dokein** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 1:14 pm

I would...
Run Disk Cleanup, Spybot, Ad-aware, Scan all drives with anti-virus. Then check the size of the paging file and defragment the drive. It maybe that you have a "system managed paging file" (Control Panel > System > Advanced Tab > Performance Settings > Advanced Tab > Change Virtual Memory) that is growing because of photoshop's high memory uses, and taking up your free space. I have seen paging files that are up to 3GB with this setting enabled. Worth a shot.

egibbs · #3 Post by **egibbs** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 2:35 pm

It's possible that when Photoshop starts throwing out of memory errors it has temp files open, and because it's confused it forgets to clean them up.

Run a search for *.tmp across all folders. Or if you can figure out where PS stores it's temp files (I think Adobe usually keeps them in the same directopry as the original file) look there for files with strange names starting with $, &, etc.

Also check for *.dmp (memory dumps), logs, etc.

Ed Gibbs

#4 Post by **RonS** » Tue Aug 30, 2005 3:23 pm

Have you looked at the Event Viewer? It's in Control Panel -> Administrative Tools.

dcdomain · #5 Post by **dcdomain** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 4:48 pm

The paging file size is permanently set to half my ram size (around 760mb). I've used Spybot, defragged, and ran a virus check already. No problems with Photoshop to that extent since I freed up space.

What am I looking for in the Event Viewer?

This is ridiculous, I freed up 2.5 gigs two days ago. Just left the laptop running and it's down to 1.5 already. No applications running...

mysbca · #6 Post by **mysbca** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 5:04 pm

dcdomain wrote:The paging file size is permanently set to half my ram size (around 760mb).

Check your paging file size again. I thought I permanently set my page file size to 512MB, but I've just checked this morning and the pagefile size is the size of my total RAM (1.5GB).

dcdomain · #7 Post by **dcdomain** » Wed Aug 31, 2005 5:22 pm

768mb. I have it 'unhidden' too...

egibbs · #8 Post by **egibbs** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 6:01 am

You aren't runing Norton Protected Recycle Bin, are you?

Ed Gibbs

#9 Post by **RonS** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 11:12 am

In the Event Viewer, you should look at errors or warnings that might give you a clue about what's happening here. There is obviously something going wrong, and many system-level applications will report their problems to the Event Viewer rather than splashing up an error message on the screen.

There is some process on your system that is consuming hard drive space. You might try running HijackThis, a free program that shows everything running on your system, including the ones that don't show up in your Processes list. This is a popular program for finding viruses. You can get it at http://tomcoyote.com/hjt/

Finally, you should determine where exactly the drive space is being consumed. Normally, I would do my work from a command prompt to dig into the filesystem and see where the changes are, but that's not for the lighthearted. Perhaps the best approach for you to visually "see" where the disk space is being consumed is the the excellent utility SequoiaView, available at http://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview

SequoiaView shows you graphically (using shapes) your entire hard drive, and the big files jump right out at you. This is a utility that should be on everyone's hard drive.

#10 Post by **GomJabbar** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 11:19 am

egibbs wrote:You aren't runing Norton Protected Recycle Bin, are you?

Ed Gibbs

Yeah, I had problems with that too. I don't use it anymore.

dcdomain · #11 Post by **dcdomain** » Thu Sep 01, 2005 3:15 pm

Nope not running Norton. I'm using AVG. Not running any programs and the space is down to 620mb right now. Thanks for posting all those programs and the explanations. Will look into it right now.

It was freaking PeerGuardian. 12.6 gig database file... Thanks!

T42 loses space on hard drive after every reboot!

T42 loses space on hard drive after every reboot!

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