[snorg]

mphenterprises said:

Wow. Thank you, Snorg. I really appreciate that. :D

Yeah, I am with you on this one. I have never heard of any viral infection eating away hard drive space at such a high rate.

Ya, thats what I say, I think his system is fubar and format is only cure.
Sad, but true....
I dont think its a virus, I think its corrupt windoze.

[smax013]

snorg said:

Ya, thats what I say, I think his system is fubar and format is only cure.
Sad, but true....
I dont think its a virus, I think its corrupt windoze.

I agree...it does not seem like a virus. Seems like a corrupted Windoze or maybe a corrupted drive. In the "old days", I would suggest a program like Norton Utilities (they now call it System Works), but I have a whole LOT less confidence in Norton/Symantec products than I used to. I am not aware of any current competitors in the disk utility category to Norton Utilities. I suppose that if it is between reformatting and reinstalling and Norton Utilities, I might try Norton Utilities. It cannot not make anything any worse if the next thing is reformat and reinstall. The only potential downside is to be out $50 or so if it does not help.

[snorg]

Norton Utilities etc was great stuff in the good ole Win98 days, but today Norton is a crock.
I have watched & seen plenty about Norton.

The more he tries to fix it, the more he will be tormented.

Format, less pain, most gain......

[rgreen4]

I have to agree on this. At some point you have to consider that the time involved in fighting a problem is more that the time involved in reformatting and reinstalling. I would go to one other extreme. I would burn all the personal files to CD/DVD's, even though that may take a while. Second, I would make a list of every installed progragram on the machine and gather the install disks. I would then get the disk utilities for that brand of Hard Drive (ie:Seatools for Seagate, etc.) and use it to reset the drive. Although in this last step, I might spring the $60 or so for a new 160GB HD from Newegg and do a clean install.

After installing the layered active anti-malware programs (I have gone to Avast for anti-virus and Superantispyware for spyware) I would reinstall programs and with all the anti's active, I would copy the data back over. As most of the "regulars" know, I clone my system drives and it only takes me a few minutes to do a restore by popping in the master (I run off the clones, not the master) and install all the security updates, reclone, and then run off the new clone. I've had to do it a few times this year.

I reminds me that it is about time to update all my clones (5 machines) this weekend before the New Year as I will be gone the last 10 days of the year.

[snorg]

AND

Get all your drivers before you format, so you have them handy. ;)

[rgreen4]

So true. We also never asked whether your machine is a manufactured PC or a built up machine (either by yourself or others), and whether the XP SP2 disc you have is a true install disc or a recovery disc.

It does make a difference on how you need to proceed.

[snorg]

After you format it is much better for you to put in XP home, not XP Pro.
I have learned that XP Pro is much more restrictive on what you can & cannot do. ;)

[mphenterprises]

:-) It looks like PyroFlash hasn't been back within this Forum since yesterday afternoon. Let's see if he or she has an update for us.

[jpeterson99]

I too am having the same problem as Pyro. I have never encountered this before. I had 3 gigs of harddrive space that went to Zero in 1 hour. I would delete more files. A few minutes later, it becomes zero. This happens without running any programs. However, CPU usage is at 100% at all times.

I have scanned using Kaspersky 6.0 AV, and have used Spybot so far. I'm stumped. After searching the net, this thread is the closest thing I have found that resembles my problem, except the loss of harddrive space on my system seems faster. I'm two seconds away from formatting the damn thing but my curiosity is keeping me from doing it. I want to know what this is...

Thanks in advance for your input and suggestions.

[mphenterprises]

Hi JPeterson and welcome to PCWorld. :-)




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