Disappearing hard drive space???

[alcibiades_mystery]

OK, so I just bought a 120 GB Seagate hard drive and installed it on my Windows machine. This was about two weeks ago. I copied the volume I had (a 40 GB Maxtor from way back) using Norton Ghost, and just installed the new drive as C:. Pretty easy.

Just so you also know, I'm running XP SP2 on this machine; it's an old Dell from 2001, so it has a P3 processor and 512 mb, not that that should matter.

I also have Sysmetrix installed, which is a program that maintains a graphio display of system information on the desk top. So, everyday, I'm watching while the available room on my new hard drive disappears. I'm not talking about after I install a program or load up some pictures or music. I'm talking while I'm sitting there doing NOTHING. Drip drip drip: 96.3 GB available, 96.1, 96.0, 95.4, 95.2. Bleeding away hard drive space. What in the name of fuck is this now? I ran Norton Virus Scan and lost a whole fucking gigabyte in the process!

Now, I also have Window Washer, which bleaches the temp files daily, and I have defragmented the volume, and I run scan disk daily, and it bleeds, bleeds, bleeds: 94.2, 94.0, 93.6...

This is fucking ridiculous. What is getting written onto the hard drive to take up this much space? How can I check what is being put on that drive? Any ideas?

(PS: I also have a Linux machine that runs great, and that I built myself, but I've done a lot of work on this old Dell and I'd like it to still work properly. Is it just a question of having to partition such a large volume?)

[WhollyHeretic]

1. Have you checked what it says about free space in My Computer?

Maybe Sysmetrix got screwed up by the ghosting from a 40GB to 120GB drive and the hard drive isn't actually filling up.

Is the hard drive light on a lot when your not opening a new file or program?

You also could check the size of the folders on the root of the C: and see which, if any, increase a lot during the day.

[alcibiades_mystery]

4. Sysmetrix is working fine

The problem fixed itself with a scan disk that fixed errors.

[FormerDittoHead]

2. First - find the files

I used "diskmapper" but here's a cheaper util that does the same thing:
http://tucows.com/preview/268351 (30 day free trial).

To others, if there is such util as freeware (for WINDOWS) let us know...

This should show where those gigs are going...

[alcibiades_mystery]

3. Thanks much

The problem seems to have cleared itself up with a disk scan that fixed errors.

Cheers.