Disk Cleaner making system unbootable

[rgg]

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

 

[looked]

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.

I never run the disk cleanup utility because it doesn't tell you specifically what files it will delete also M$crosoft won't take any responsibility if there is any damage to the system.
If I were you, I would definitely reinstall Windows.

1) For cleaning the system use CCleaner, check the settings and never delete anything you don't know what is about.
2) Install Rollback RX Home (free) which will make a shot of the "whole" system unlike Microsoft's system restore. Disable any defragmenting tasks in task scheduler and never rut it because Rollback uses its own defrag utility.

 

[Megahertz07]

You may have a disk problem.
Boot from the installation disk, go to Repair and launch a CMD window. Type:
chkdsk c: /f

Then do a system file check. Type:
sfc /scannow

 

[Layback Bear]

From post #2

I never run the disk cleanup utility because it doesn't tell you specifically what files it will delete also M$crosoft won't take any responsibility if there is any damage to the system.
If I were you, I would definitely reinstall Windows.

The owners of Ccleaner will also not take any responsibility if you use their program.

I use Windows 7 Disk Cleanup Tool just about every day for years without problems.

In my opinion using Windows 7 built into tools is the safest tools to use because in most cases Windows 7 tries to protect itself.

Jack

 

[torchwood]

Hi

DiskCleaner has been known to incorrectly state the size of files/folders that have Hardlinks associated with them. I've seen reports of 3.99TB on 100GB drive on our W10 forum.
The user did not report any problems after letting the program complete.


Roy

 

[Layback Bear]

I personally don't worry about that size of files/folders that shows when using Disk Cleanup.
I read what it's cleaning and if I like it I check it.

Just like I don't worry about the reported size of WinSXS.

Jack

 

[Megahertz07]

I also never had any problems using Disk Cleanup.
Can it be crossed links on the allocation table?
That's why I asked to do the check disk and a system file check. It's the basic start.

 

[rgg]

You may have a disk problem.
Boot from the installation disk, go to Repair and launch a CMD window. Type:
chkdsk c: /f

Then do a system file check. Type:
sfc /scannow

chkdsk run from the installation disk seems to scan just the System Reserved partition and reports no errors other than "Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50"

I scheduled chkdsk to run on reboot - no errors found

sfc /scannow - Windows Resource Protection did not find any integrity violations

I found the Windows Server 2008 version of cleanmgr and ran it out of interest - it reports Temp Files as 32.8MB which sounds more accurate that the Windows 7 version which is now reporting 1.08TB

I'm wondering if the issue is an obscure bug in the Win7 version of cleanmgr rather than a system problem.

I'd rather not reinstall from scratch without knowing what the cause is - the issue could still be there afterwards.

 

[Megahertz07]

Did you install Win 7 as Legacy - MBR or UEFI - GPT?

 

[rgg]

Did you install Win 7 as Legacy - MBR or UEFI - GPT?

Installed as Legacy-MBR