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I have Windows7 installed on 50GB (Oops, it should have been 45GB, sorry) partition, and every now and then it gets full, and I have to resize that partition. I always thought it is quite normal. But it happened again today and this time, I'm sure it is not normal, because since last resizing (35GB > 45GB) I did not install any new apps or whatever. Also, sum of sizes off all, including hidden & system, root folders and files is ~18GB, yet windows is indicating that all 50GB are used up...
Any idea what is going on?

EDIT:
Great tools everyone! (SourceForge appears to be offline at the moment, I'll check WinDirStat later) Alas, non of them solved my problem just yet...

On the right there is some kind of "Unknows Space", any idea what that could be?

EDIT2:
After those two apps failing to help much I didn't expect it, but WinDirStat actually helped. It showed that those missing 27GB are in my Temp folder (Well, that should have been my first guess anyway). There I found hundreds of ~100MB files, named like HTT????.tmp. After some googling it appears to be a problem with ESET NOD32 antivirus and it's ThreatSense feature.
Thank you all for help! :)

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6 Answers

up vote 7 down vote accepted

Try to see what is taking disk space with a tool like WinDirStat.

enter image description here

It will show you how the space is used, and by what, so you will be able to understand and take measures according to this. Don't hesitate to edit your question with what exactly is taking more space, if you want more details about it.

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up vote 2 down vote

I like better Scanner for its useful pie design and right-click context menu:

enter image description here

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Would the down-voter please explain why? Scanner is a program I like and use a lot. – harrymc Oct 28 '09 at 11:33
People downvote easily without reason, obviously.. I have to say I prefer pie design for exploring disk, I was a big fan of diskSpace Explorer, but the company making it is now caring about something else, unfortunately.. OverDisk is not bad too as a pie design, and keeps the tree as well: users.forthnet.gr/pat/efotinis/programs/overdisk.html – Gnoupi Oct 28 '09 at 13:47
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up vote 1 down vote

Another useful program in the fight against storage space, is "SpaceSniffer" (http://www.uderzo.it/main%5Fproducts/space%5Fsniffer/index.html). Tested on Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and 7. Also freeware.

This program works great and quite fast (as fast as the machine can handle). Simple hover the mouse cursor over a data block or click for more information. There is even a tip on the author's website to integrate SpaceSniffer into the Windows Explorer Context Menu. Handy!

Check out the website, I'm new here and cannot post a picture. :)

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up vote 1 down vote

This problem is related to ESET antivirus.

If you temporarily disable antivirus protection, the tmp files stop growing immediately. Process ekrn.exe is the only one that is locking those files and writing to them (investigated by PsTools Filemon and by Unlocker utility).

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And how to solve it? – Gnoupi Apr 4 '10 at 16:56
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up vote 0 down vote

Please see this question. In my case, it was the shadow copy system using up more than 50% of my hard drive. The accepted answer solved the problem for me, and you can use the vssadmin to set a maximum amount of space to use.

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Thank you, but I've already found a solution, see second Edit. – sYnfo Oct 29 '09 at 9:40
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Great, glad to hear it! Perhaps someone else who finds this question will be helped by my mention of shadow-copy. Maybe not. :) Have a good one. – ChrisInEdmonton Oct 29 '09 at 21:46
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up vote 0 down vote

Have you checked if the "Unknown Space" reported by SpaceSniffer is because you access your account with weak privileges? Or did you stop the scan before it ends?

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I'm not sure why it reported those files as "unknown", maybe because they had Archive attribute set, nothing else was special about them. Anyway, I've already solved this problem of mine, see second Edit... :) – sYnfo Oct 29 '09 at 9:38
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