Hard drive is full but no files, help!!!

I

Izidro

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Jan 4, 2010
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Ok so I'm trying to fix a friend's computer. I've got a fair bit of experience but this one baffles. She's an old lady all she does is photos, internet and email. All of the sudden the hard drive began filling up, she's literally down to something like 800 megs of her 80 gb hard drive, but there is only truly something like 20 gigs on the hard drive. It was down to 15 free, then 7, then 1, etc. like over the course of a day or two the space was just actively "filling" up. The cpu and ram are at normal idle rates the hard drive is going NUTS!!! What could this be? Thanks in advance. It's windows XP fyi.
 
Maybe a Trojan?

Is your windows explorer set to show all hidden and system files as well as the file extensions?

Try going to the root folder, select all the visible folders and hit ALT-ENTER, just to check if all the folders are accounted for. And then it's just a matter of seeing which folder has 50+gigs of files, enter it, check again, enter that, etc.

If all those folders combined doesn't equal 70+Gigs, then it's in a hidden folder in the root.


If this was Windows7, i'd be checking the resource monitor too to check for disk activity. Does that have an equivalent in XP?
 
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Several years ago I had a hard drive fill up in a couple of days. I took the drive to a friend of mine. He hooked it up to his computer and ran antivirus and and found over 800 virus and stuff. After he cleaned the virus off the drive I had all my lost space back.
 
Also check Disk Management in the control panel and double check the hard drive partitioning.
 
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