A few days ago, I had a lil' 'Low disk space' balloon popping up from my taskbar saying I was running out of space on C: (I could hardly believe it!) But ever since I got this 4th PC, I've been keeping the C: partition purely for Windows (with some obvious experiences 3 rounds of fire!) But then I had NFS UG-2 on it this time, so I ripped it off freeing ~1.7GB of space. Now my partition is worth ~10GB.

The next day, it pops up again, saying I have less than 200MB left on C:! How on earth is it possible for ~1.7GB worth free space getting hogged up in 24hrs without me intentionally doing anything?!

So the immediate concern was malware/virii. So is there any such malware that fakes Low Disk Space warnings, or does really fill up free space by junk data?! Of course, I scanned my PC using Spybot S&D, which found the usual tracking cookies n stuff. And Avast! Antivirus, which found a trojan horse worth a few cents. Nothing down there. Problem still persists - everytime I free up space squeezing something out of C:, its back to <200MB!

Help!

I useful too that I have found is SpaceMonger (http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php). SpaceMonger is a free utility that graphically displays how much space a file or directory is taking up. You can quickly look at the diagram that it generates and see that large DVD rip sitting on your hard drive. The larger the file, the larger the rectangle it generates.

There are also a few other possibilities if Windows is the only thing on your primiary drive. Take a look at the Internet Explorer cache size. Tools > Internet Options, Settings button under Temporary Internet Files for Internet Explorer 6. Out of the box Internet Explorer tends to take a lot of space for caching. Another place to look is the size that the Recycle Bin is taking. Right click Recycle Bin > Properties. Yet another is System Restore. Right click My Computer > Properties, System Restore Tab.

I hope this helps you out a little.

I have had my share of mysterious drive space losses too. System Restore is something I usually keep turned off. It slows the installations down and quite often fails to restore as well, not to mention the unusually high disk space it eats up. Some applications generate a lot of temporary files but do not delete them on exit. So you might as well want to check your %Temp% directory. If you have a lot of RAM, your paging file, typically located at C:\pagefile.sys is taking up a lot of space. By default, it is setup to take 1.5 times the space of your RAM. Then there is the hibernate file, C:\hiberfil.sys which takes 1x times your RAM's size.

Apart from these and the ones mentioned by tansqrx, I have found some amount of disk space (2-3 GB in my case) to have gone away mysteriously. The only way I could reclaim it was formatting the drive.

Thanks a ton, guys!I was actually upto uninstalling my programs with this nuisance (left with only ~52MB) of free space on C:!
SpaceMonger worked out perfectly for me! So here's the culprit(s):

• %temp% revealed a ~1GB file, which turned out to be an isolated image of a really old CD burn (sometime around Feb '07) - maybe Nero left it off unsolicited (though it usually doesn't!).
• System Restore was the one actually swelling up the drive. Everytime I used to uninstall some programs to free up disc space, it make a restore point, eating up the same amount of space again!
  • Believe it or not, System Restore hold(ed) ~3.5GBs of data! Damn that!
  • System Restore was disabled in CP. Stealth operations, is it?!

Also, since I was into SpaceMonger, I found a couple of ancient movies I had on my HDD, which I don't happen to recall viewing since they got in there in the first place! But we aren't let-goers of Digital Media, are we? Burn(t) 'em down DVDs! So that freed up another ~5GB of space - considered a bonus, I should say!

At the end of it, I'm happy to have resolved the issue effortlessly, thanking you!

I frequently go through my temp file and delete all the stuff in it. I notice that when an application hangs, or when there's a power cut in the middle of my work, the files just sit there and don't get deleted. Fortunately I have an 80GB partition for C:, but still it can fill up pretty fast. I think i clear about 10 or 15 GB per week out of it. Multiple photoshop temp files in excess of 2GB each, Nero images, extracted file copies, and more.

Like turbopowerdmaxsteel said, system restore don't serve much purpose other than eating up our precious disk space. I usually turn off the system restore right after i install my windows.

For temp file cleaning, you can consider CClearer http://www.ccleaner.com/. It safely remove most of the temp file while not disrupting the system. Another plus point for CCleaner is that it loads the uninstall list much faster than window's "Add/Remove Programs" in control panel.

Wow that Space monger was a real find !!! thanks for that!
I really love the visual way it displays your folders and you can really zoom down on the structures and files beneath them.
I like Graffitti use Photoshop all day and yes I found 8gig of temp space used up by Adobe.
Also found a movie that I must have dropped in the wrogn folder some time ago.
A very usefull tool indeed!!