Hard Drive filling up

All:

My wife is having trouble with"her" PC again–it's a Dell Dimension XPS T500 running Win XP. She says her system hard drive is almost full, and she's not doing anything to cause that. I wanted to get right to seeing what the problem was, but she decided she had to try to move some files to an external HDD tied to the machine via USB to see if that helped. It didn't. The system drive now shows less free space than it did before.

I did install a new version of Zone Alarm Free about 2 weeks ago, and started getting "New Network Found" messages for a network to IP address XXX(my router address is XXX). I don't know if she's still getting those messages. I never got them with the previous version of ZA. I put a message up on the software forum over a week ago, but haven't heard anything back.


–Tom vonHatten

http://forums.whatthetech.com/Hard_Drive_F…es_t112067.html

Hey tvhevh, Have you got the specifications of your wife's machine? Would be useful to know how big the HDD is, and whether it's partitioned. Cheers, Nahumi

From the HJT log file in the malware forum, I see you are running Acronis True Image on that computer. Where is it backing up to?
Do you use the Acronis Secure Zone? Is it set to expand as needed? If so, maybe that is what is eating up drive space.

Can you post two images here please?

One of My Computer showing the hard drives/partitions and total vs free space.
The other of Disk Management. Move the window edges as needed to show everything.
Easiest way to open Disk Management is to click on Start then Run, type diskmgmt.msc and press Enter.

You can use Alt+Print Screen to capture the active window, then paste from the clipboard into Paint then save the image and upload it here.
Start paint by clicking on Start then Run, type mspaint and press Enter.

Use the Browse and Upload buttons below the message area to find the images and upload them, then click on the Manage Current Attachments area then on the first green icon for each image to paste a link into your reply here.

There's only one HDD actually on the machine, and it's unpartitioned (C:). I've run one save of Acronis, and it's sent to the external HDD mentioned earlier. I've not set it up to do periodic backups (and yes, I know I probably should). I managed to move about 1 GB of MP3 files over to the external drive, and that's now showing up as free space on the C: drive. Here are the images you wanted to see: 📎diskmgmt.JPG 📎mycomputer.JPG –Tom vonHatten

Here are links to two tutorial for freeing up space on your hard drive:

How to clean up your hard drive to increase free space NOW!
How to free up space on your hard drive - long term

See if they help.

I installed Sequoia View and it showed me a 4 gig log file named tvDebug.log. I tried to delete the file, and found that it was being used. I did a web search, and found out that it was tied to the new version of Zone Alarm Free (ver 9.1.007.002) I loaded onto the machine a little less than a month ago. The machine was showing repeated "new network found" messages–maybe that's what was causing the log file to be so big. I ended up being linked to a forum page on the CheckPoint/Zone Alarm forum that told someone else with this problem to turn off the debug function for Zone Alarm, and listed how to do it. I did, and could then delete the file. The machine is now back to where it was when this all started. –Tom vonHatten

Well done Tom. Glad you got it sorted. SequoiaView is a neat program.