I got home the other day and discovered a PC on the floor in the hallway.

"Paul, says his PC is doing something wierd" says my wife.

I stuck on the test bench, fired it up and gave my mate a call.
He said, theres no space left on the HDD, but there was hardly anything installed.

Sure enough, the start menu looked a bit sparse, yet the system reported only 3gigs of free space from a 500 gig drive. I ran a search for large files and came up empty, even after selecting show hidden files and folders.

So I opened explorer and started looking at folder sizes. Lo and behold, docs and settings was showing over 450 gigs.

After much trawling through folders I found two temp files weighing in at 390 and 63 gigs. Deleting them wasn't a problem and malware scans turned up nothing.

So his PC seems fine and he has plenty of space, but I was wondering what could cause the creation of such huge temp files?

Any ideas?

Did he try to download software that contained a non-terminating file?

Surely a quick run of Disk Cleanup would have fixed this?

Nope. Cleanup did nothing. It didn't list the files, or show a large amount of wasted space.

Thats why I ran a malware scan.

What were the files called? What was the ascii in the first few pages? Usually, files give some clue as to what they are for. Obviously, if you deleted them without looking then you'll never know. The rustybucket's guess is as good as any, and I'll throw in the possibility of a "file eraser" that crashed. The other option is simple disk corruption - do a full Scandisk after you've backed up the drive.

Do back up the drive if there's anything important on it. Obviously, you should back up important stuff anyway but it's extra-obvious when there's any suspicion of possible imminent failure.

Thinking about it though, 390 gigs would be a hell of a big DL to not notice.

I'm thinking now something along the lines of the filespaces being erroneously allocated by the OS.

Assuming his OS was Windows, using a Linux LiveCD to access the drive may have shown the files to be phantoms.

However they're gone now so meh.

I didn't note the filenames, but they looked like randomly generated alpha-numeric names.

He has fallen foul of not backing up stuff before, thankfully he now backs up regularly to an external disk.

The file eraser crash sounds plausible, I'll ask him if he had installed any secure wiping software. It seems a bit overkill for him, but I'll ask.


The thought crossed my mind, I think he only has a 2meg line too.

He's not been messing about with video editing software, has he?

I'm wondering whether a temp file has been created, and apended to... no? maybe?

No, I was half expecting some monstrous webcam recording when he said the drive had suddenly become full.

But he doesn't have a webcam, nor does he do any video encoding/editing.