Solved Windows says hard disk is full, despite TreeSize disagreeing.

[DougStevens]

Hi. I'm having problems with a Win 7 Machine.

It is constantly coming up with disk is almost full errors, and when you look at Explorer, it shows 2Gb of a 111Gb drive left.

However, since I noticed that, I've moved 27Gb of data off the machine from old user profiles and 12Gb from an old .ost file. That should have cleared about 40Gb, but it's still sowing as only 2Gb remaining.

I've loaded Treesize, and it shows 70Gb usage, with 41Gb free, but explorer still maintains it has 111Gb used and only 2Gb Free.

Any ideas?

 

[crawfish]

Recycle bin?

 

[whs]

Did you reboot

 

[crawfish]

How might rebooting help?

One might need to press F5 to make Explorer refresh the free space it reports in a window that was open while the deletes were done through another window, but if the OP's running TreeSize and whatnot, I figured he probably opened a new Explorer window, got Properties on the drive through Explorer, etc, any of which is going to report the current state of the drive, no reboot necessary.

 

[Layback Bear]

crawfish I think a better question would be: How can rebooting hurt. It's free and solves many things at times.
Many time a reboot will just give Windows 7 a fresh look at things.

 

[crawfish]

crawfish I think a better question would be: How can rebooting hurt. It's free and solves many things at times.
Many time a reboot will just give Windows 7 a fresh look at things.

Seriously? So after you move or delete files, it's reasonable to think rebooting may be just the thing you need to do to get Explorer to correctly assess what's on the disk. I've not encountered that necessity, nor have I ever heard of this serious flaw in Explorer, hence the question I asked of the person who suggested it. Pending his reply, the OP might want to consider the things I suggested which will ensure Explorer gets a "fresh look" without resorting to a disruptive, unnecessary reboot, assuming he didn't do the first thing I mentioned, which was move the files to the Recycle Bin, which rebooting wouldn't "help" anyway.

 

[carwiz]

I don't trust TreeSize anyway. It can't see a lot of hidden files. The free space may have been gobbled up by Windows as soon as it was made available. Things like the Pagefile, Restore Points, SuperFetch and probably a few others I can't recall at the moment, may be sized dynamically based on free space.

 

[HoneycombAG]

All files have to be stored in one or more file allocation units, disk clusters that, if you set them too big, it will just end up costing too much space every time you store little files. By default, NTFS formats with 4K clusters.

After having said that, I got to thinking, how much space is being taken up by System Restore?

 

[crawfish]

To me, it sounded like the OP checked right after freeing 40 GB, as he found exactly the same disk usage as he did before freeing the space. I don't think even Microsoft could uselessly eat up exactly what was freed that fast. I don't see how the cluster size could be a factor.

One thing just occurred to me. If the OP isn't doing this already, start TreeSize using "Run as adminstrator". That will let it look inside System Volume Information folders and other forbidden places.

 

[matts6887]

To me, it sounded like the OP checked right after freeing 40 GB, as he found exactly the same disk usage as he did before freeing the space. I don't think even Microsoft could uselessly eat up exactly what was freed that fast. I don't see how the cluster size could be a factor.

One thing just occurred to me. If the OP isn't doing this already, start TreeSize using "Run as adminstrator". That will let it look inside System Volume Information folders and other forbidden places.

Agreed. It will do that if you run it as administrator; otherwise it may not let you "see" everything as far as size counts, etc.

 

[DougStevens]

Solved

Seems the issue was related to a Bloomberg app that was running. It was creating snapshots, and they were so badly fragmented that it ate up the space.

Standard Windows stuff didn't work, and we had to run a specific "defragger" that comes with the Bloomberg software before it would free the space.

Now got 40+Gb of free space, as it should be.

Thanks for your help.

 

[whs]

That's good to hear. You are welcome.

 

[Layback Bear]

Well done. Thanks for letting us know what the problem was.