Hard drive space suddenly full! Is this a virus??

I was using my computer today and suddenly a pop up came up in the system tray informing my hard drive is full! I told me one after the other, starting with my primary then my two other additional storage drives.

I have 3 hard drives installed in my computer- A, B, and C (primary) drives, I know A drive's getting full and I've been meaning to replace it wit ha larger drive, but B and C should have plenty of space left, on the computer view they did appear to be full, but calculating the actual space consumed, A drive is 880 GB of 931, B drive is 1.37 TB of 1.81 TB and C drive is 633 GB of 1.31 TB. Windows is claiming all the drives are full, it even brought up the disk cleanup window. There's over a terabyte of free space missing!

Then as I checked around I noticed windows repeatedly changes the amount of free space in the drives at lowest still about 100 GB above the actual disk usage and at highest i claimed it's full!

I have Norton Internet Security 2013 and I ran a full system scan, it reported no security problems were found.

Can someone please help me with this?

I am running windows Vista Home Premium x64

No new programs or updates were installed recently, and when this suddenly popped up I was just watching youtube videos.

This thread is locked. You can vote as helpful, but you cannot reply or subscribe to this thread.

Answer

Bill Smithers

Hi,

Use this free Program to see what is taking up the space.

http://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/

System Restore also by default takes up 15% of the capacity of your Hard Drive space.

You can change the size of it:

http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/76227-system-restore-disk-space.html

You can clean up your Hard Drive using these two methods.

"Delete files using Disk Cleanup"

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-vista/delete-files-using-disk-cleanup

Using the Free CCleaner Program:

http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner

Under NO condition use the Registry cleaning Option in CCleaner

And download, install, update and scan your System with the free version of Malwarebytes AntiMalware:

http://www.malwarebytes.org/products/malwarebytes_free

And Norton Backup can do strange things with filling up Hard Drive space.

Cheers.

___________________________________________________

Bill Smithers - Microsoft MVP July 2013 - Dec 2020

Contribute to the Windows forum!

Hard drive space suddenly full! Is this a virus??

Replies (12)

Question Info

Hard drive space suddenly full! Is this a virus??

Replies (12) 

Question Info

Replies (12)