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#1
Disk Cleaner making system unbootable
Hi all,
Last night, I ran Disk Cleanup (cleanmgr.exe) on a reasonably fresh install of Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1, which resides on the only drive on the system - a 128GB SSD. I noticed it was reporting that over 800GB could be freed up from Temporary Files, but put this down to a minor glitch and went ahead with the cleanup.
After it was done, Chrome failed to open and gave an error about a missing .dll file. Various .dll files were reported as missing while trying to run other programs, and Windows system apps like Regedit and Task Manager were reported as being missing. The exe files were still in the system folder, but from research I think they actually link to files in the winsxs folder, which seemed to have been gutted.
After a failed reboot, I managed to use a restore point from a couple of hours earlier and I'm all back up and running now with Disk Cleanup still reporting an insane amount of GBs.
I found a post elsewhere with the same issue on a Windows 7 machine with an SSD, but nothing about the cause of the problem or how to fix it.
Windows is genuine and up to date, virus scan reports nothing, SSD firmware is up to date.
So far, I've found out that Disk Cleanup goes through the registry entries under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches as part of the process:
and Temporary Files links to %TEMP%, which maps to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Temp, which is a lot less than the 925GB it reports.
Has anyone encountered this before or know of how to find out what's going wrong? I could just reinstall and hope it goes away, but these bugs bug me :)