hard drive problems continually increasing

Many of you know about the ghetto problem my hard drive is having with space because you have heard me talk about it before. It continually gets worse, and now it is the worse it has ever been....so bad in fact that not only can I let it go any further, it couldn't go any further if it wanted to.

I remember many months ago when I posted messages saying how my computer was constantly varying the amount of free hard drive space it reported to be between 1 GB and 250 MB. It did that for awhile. The total capacity of the hd is 8 GB. I knew I had not used up that much hd space to take up that much space.

Well, it has been getting even worse now, and I cannot understand why. I never install anything on this hard drive anymore. I always install applications on my 40 GB hd that I got about a year ago. However, the original 8 GB hd has the OS on it, and many important files, and it needs to stay in the computer. I never install anything on it, yet the amount of free space continuously gets lower.

Though it used to reach a max of 1 GB, now it only reaches a max of 150 MB. It has even hit as low as 7.5 MB of free space. Right now it is sitting at 40 MB.

It constantly varies throughout these numbers, going up and down, although I install nothing.

I have checked for viruses numerous times and have consistently found none.

I have no time to go an extensive check of this hard drive at the moment, and I wont have time until Saturday, but I am getting pretty desperate here, because this hd problem keeps getting worse and worse.

So I am wondering if anyone has experienced the same thing with any computer they have had in the past and what they did to resolve it.

Also, what do you think I can do to solve this problem, short of formatting the entire hd. I just dont see why it is doing this...

You run Windows or Nix?

'doze I know swaps in the parition it runs in, rather than using another one, that might be eating up space. you can check how much space you let your swap file take up in your system properties.

Wither either OS, you can do a quick stat of your disk usage, either use the nix du command or in Windows right click on the top level folders in your hard drive, and jot down the space used by each. Then if you notice a drastic change you can profile again and find out what grew. Most likely a swap or something in /tmp or Windows/Temp.

I've had similar problems like this, try and set the swap file to be on the other HD - also - go into your Internet Tools under IE and change the temp folders for the Internet to the other HD.

Then goto www.winguides.com and get RegCleaner which is a program that will clean up your registry - try that and see if the problems are fixed.

The fluctuations could be attributed to the fact taht when IE uses temp internet files it will store crap loads of them both in normal folders and the hidden content.ie5 folders. If there's x amount of disk space left it deletes x% of offline content automatically. Take a look into your internet options.

Yeah I am using Windows XP. But this problem didnt start with XP...it started with 95...it has just been continuing with XP.

I already have checked out the amount of space being used by my temporary and internet temporary folders. The temporary folder has about 30 MB of files, and the internet temporary folder has about 70 MB of files. Even if I delete those, that is only 100 MB, and knowing how this problem has been going, that space will be eaten up again easily within 2 days.

I just installed Photoshop 7 on my computer yesterday (I installed it on my 40 GB hd like I do all my programs). I was trying to run it, and after the application opened, a little pop up message came up and said I was out of disk space on drive C (my 8 GB hd...the one having problems). I was like, what the heck is that? So I opened up windows explorer and it had about 7 MB of free space left. Then I closed Photoshop and it went up to 40.5 MB of free space. Either it was creating temporary files on drive C or it was using the swap file. I dont see why it would use the swap file when its the only app I had open and I already have like 396 MB of ram or so...

Still, even with that...thats brand new...and the problem isnt...so thats not directly related to the problem...although it might be indirectly related.

Yeah, set your Swap File to be on the 40gb... You can do this under the system settings in control panel, you know where you get to your device mgr. Under the Performance tab or something similar you can change the swap file settings - the SWAP file takes up a minimum of 384MB and up to 764+MB, that's usually the default settings. Anyways, you can create another swap file via that dialog in your other HD and then delete the reference to the SWAP file in your C: or main HD. After you do that you can observe if your problem continues.