Windows 8: Hard Drive Inexplicably Filling

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Sovereign

2[H]4U
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Mar 21, 2005
Messages
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OS: Windows 8 Pro x64 (no 8.1), upgraded-in-place from Windows 7
Description of problem: The hard drive randomly fills, but only the C: partition (D: has data, but not Windows). It is NOT the Windows.edb search bug that was resolved in an update rollup this past May, 2013 as I checked the Windows.edb file size and it had not changed over 15 minutes while the disk was still filling.

WinDirStat reports the same level of used space as "normal," and does not show any additional files even when the drive has 160kB (yes, kilobytes) left.

Rebooting the machine makes the disk usage drop back to normal, but the drive resumes re-filling around 0.1GB/couple minutes. Sometimes the 0.1GB increment can happen as often as every few seconds. Basically, I can sit at the My Computer screen, hit refresh, and watch C: fill.

I have disconnected the machine from the internet. If malware is the cause, it is working its mischief locally. I am currently scanning using the most up-to-date version of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware.

Even when the C: partition is full, D: never gets touched.
 
How about in safemode? Run MSConfig, go to the boot tab, select safeboot and then reboot. Also, try disabling all things from startup if that does not work.
 
Could you check your backup profile configuration? I'm suspecting File History is going haywire since the files aren't showing up in WinDirStat.
 
I turned File History off--and the drive continues to fill.

I don't know where the offline cache is (it's set to 5%), though.
 
Look in task manager or resource monitor, who is writing to the disk and to what file? That should help narrow it down.
 
Just out of curiosity, did you delete your Windows.old folder?
 
MrCrispy said:
Look in task manager or resource monitor, who is writing to the disk and to what file? That should help narrow it down.
Click to expand...

The very descriptive "System" is the only process I see. It does bursts of ~1.2MB/sec. Thing is, that didn't seem very abnormal until I noticed my disk shrinking.

The frustrating thing is that tools like WinDirStat show absolutely nothing when the drive is at its worst "full" state--they only show the files/folders/use I would expect!

RangerXML said:
Just out of curiosity, did you delete your Windows.old folder?
Click to expand...

Can't find it, so I assume I did.

The problem does not occur in Safe Mode (15 minutes idle, no random writes/filling).

I may use Reset (saves me from actually having to reinstall Windows, though I'll have to put all my desktop apps back).

There's not some weird bug with network drives, is there? It started happening after I mapped a network drive (always reconnect) that is rarely available... Not sure if spurious correlation, or insidious bug.
 
Figured it out!

If you do this: Windows Vista/7/8 Microsoft Boot Optimization...

...be sure to run the command "xbootmgr -remove" before uninstalling or modifying your installation of the Windows Performance Toolkit. If you don't, Windows will continuously generate HUGE (multi-gigabyte, disk-filling) files that mysteriously disappear on every boot, but then like a tumor, grow back!
 
I seen a similar problem happening on an xp machine this week at work. I wonder if it can happen on xp also. I'll have to read through the article later.

The hard drive was showing completely full, but it was showing full at 22GB (80GB installed). I thought maybe the drive was going out, but all tests showed no errors. The machine was only used to keep spreadsheets on, so after backing up the files, I ended up reformatting it per the owner's request, with fresh install, everything was fine, drive showed correct usage again. I wish they would have let me poke around long enough to figure out what the problem really was.
 
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