Need an urgent help please!!

Hey everyone, I have Sony Vaio laptop and I have an urgent problem that I could not fix after 5 hours of web searching.

I have been using this laptop for about 2 years, with Window Vista OS.

I had no problem with free space shrinking in C drive, but recently, the available space in C drive kept decreasing very rapidly. (about 0.1 gig per min)

I have tried everything that I could find on the web: disabled the system restoration function (this seems to the solution for many others who had the same problem as me, but it did not do anything for me. I have neither gained free space or fixed the problem), deleted shadow storage, deleted all temporary files and cookies, tried to use vssadmin command to limit shadow storage/system restoration fucntion (but since they were already disabled, it didn't work as well), defragmentation, something to do with storage reclaiming, and virus scan.

One thing I found though was that during the virus scan, I found a trojan file and I removed it, but the problem did not go away.

Is it somehow related? or is there any other solution?

As of now, I only have about 6 gig left (so.. about an hour I can use my computer lol... .I am using someone else's computer now to save the time), and I already removed many programs (like microsoft office) so that I can buy some extra time to attempt those solutions. So, this is basically my last chance.....

Help please.. any advices or opinions???

Thank you.

 

Sounds like a virus or a run away program.

 

hey thanks for the reply.. what do u mean by a run away program? is there any way to fix it?

 

Something is obviously either writing multiple files to your system or is larding up existing files, and a virus or other malware would be a perfect suspect. At this point, if you've swept for virii and other malware, removed what you can find, and the problem still persists, then the best solution is probably to pull the drive from the computer, put it in an external USB enclosure, hook it up to another computer and then scan it very deeply and thoroughly from that other computer. By doing that, the drive in your VAIO will be treated as a passive data storage device, and nothing will be run from it without your permission, which will prevent the malware from continuing to grow on its own.

Second best would be using a LiveCD (e.g., some linux variant), or downloading and burning to CD the Ultimate Boot CD (aka the "UBCD"). The UBCD contains some anti-malware utilities in the standard setup that you can download from the link above; however, the UBCD can also be customized, so you might check some of the free anti-malware apps listed in the Security and Anti-Virus forum to see if any of them could be included in the UBCD and then used when you boot the system from the UBCD. Again, by doing this, the computer will not be booting from the hard drive, and consequently the hard drive will be treated as a passive data storage device, with the result that the malware currently on there will not get a chance to run and continue eating up your disk.

Finally, it could also be the case that your hard drive is failing and is progressively eating itself up by generating bad sectors (e.g., if the swing-arm on which the read head rides were colliding with the disks, each collision would destroy some of the recording surface of the disk). The UBCD contains some hard drive diagnostic apps as well, so it would be a good idea to run some diagnostic tests on the hard drive at the same time that you're hunting for undiscovered malware.

 

One think you could do is grab a copy of Process Explorer from the SystemInternals page. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

It can show you the processes that are reading from and writing to the hard drive. There is a column for each and you can sort on that column. As fast as you are loosing disk space the culprit should float to the top of that sorted list.

Gary

 

Thanks everyone for your postings.

I think I found a source of the problem. I tried to scan for the virus using some 90 dollar service from a professional, and they said they did not find any virus (im getting a refund though )

Anyhow, I was looking at disk cleanup to remove all unnecessary files... and shockingly, "system queued windows error reporting" was taking 760 gb of the unnecessary space.. weird thing is my computer has only 225 gb space wtihout anything. so I am removing this huge junk right now..

Could anyone explain this phenomena please?

Thanks!

 

wow and i see my free space just increased from 5.3 gb to 20 g lol...

 

Does it have anything to do with window update?

I have a window update that I haven't installed (it doesnt work for some reason), so maybe the system was trying to send the error constantly without stopping, and is that why there was a huge amount of accumulated junk?

 

That sounds like there were a whole bunch of errors, such as applications closing unexpectedly, that .Windows tried to report to MS but was unable to, and thus just kept lining its reports up one after the other. When you get an error like an app crash, does a little dialogue pop up saying that X needs to close and then asking if it's ok to send an error report to MS?