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Windows 10 - Free Drive space gone!

I've got a clients laptop that has run out of free drive space. I have run Disk Cleanup which got back 2GB of free space but within minutes it had gone again.

I have also disabled Hibernate which was mentioned good be using up the free space but the drive is still empty.

Have also cleared of any shadow copies also so nothing much else to remove.... did try to installed TreeSize but not another drive space on the drive to install.

Any ideas how to locate what is using the space up?

dovidf

Use windirstat to see what is using up your disk space.

Kimputer

Still try to get enough space free to install Treesize, and run it in Administrator mode. It will give you the info you need (WinDirStat sometimes misses stuff, Offline copies for instance, even in admin mode).

Jackie Man

How large is the internal storage?

Normally, it is windows update which can take up the space.

Andrew Perry

ASKER

WinDirStat hasn't found much.... just went back to the laptop and for some reason 30GB was free again so got TreeSize installed and it's located 166GB within the Windows\Temp folder being used so that's where the space is being used up! Why, not sure as of yet!!

I've already cleared out all Windows Installation temp folders etc...

This laptop was running a 120GB SSD so cloned it to a 240GB SSD which had lots of free drive space, but within twenty minutes all of the 240GB SSD was used up again!

Andrew Perry

ASKER

As Disk Cleanup hasn't resolved the issue I am now currently running CCleaner clearing out what's not wanted...

Brian B

If the amount of space is changing like you describe (goes away and comes back) there may be an issue with the disk controller or something.

Alternatively maybe there is a rogue program or something. Try running in safe mode and see if your steps to clean up space actually sticks.

Andrew Perry

ASKER

I think I have pinpointed the issue, it looks like at the moment to be AVG FREE using the space up... just removing it to see what occurs..

Brian B

Great, let us know. Safe mode would help identify that as the problem and more.

Kimputer

That much hard disk activity with that much space involved is easy to track down with the Resource Monitor. But I would call it Rogue even if AVG is well-known. No program should use tens of GB's of space in mere minutes.

Andrew Perry

ASKER

Right, AVG completely removed but the drive space is going down again from 31.4GB and is currently on 15GB free drive space.
There is 188GB of used space within C:\Windows\Temp folder and I cannot work out to what's causing this issue!!

I've done a few Disk Cleanups, CCleaner etc.... just free's up a little...

Any ideas?

Kimputer

As I said, Resource Monitor (start > run > resmon (enter) will steer you to the faulting app in no time. Look at the Disk section and sort on Total (B/s) column. The highest user is probably the faulty app (and it's obvious if it's using files in Windows\Temp).
Alternatively use ProcMon https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/procmon (again, look for activity in Windows\Temp)

Andrew Perry

ASKER

I think it's pointing at wsappx to be the problem using Resource Monitor

Kimputer

That's built into Windows with no way to disable it. Better then to restore windows to before the problem occurred.

nobus

check with treesize or other soft what file is increasing - it should give you more info

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Andrew Perry

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Brian B

Thanks for letting us know. Agree that sometimes there isn't time to find the root causes and you just have to fix it.