Help
Welcome to BleepingComputer, a free community where people like yourself come together to discuss and learn how to use their computers. Using the site is easy and fun. As a guest, you can browse and view the various discussions in the forums, but can not create a new topic or reply to an existing one unless you are logged in. Other benefits of registering an account are subscribing to topics and forums, creating a blog, and having no ads shown anywhere on the site.
Posted 23 April 2009 - 08:49 PM
Hi Everyone,
After wiping some egg off my face with Dell,I feel I may have more after this post, but honestly, I'm stumped...here's the S.P;
I have a 160GB HDD in my notebook and installed Acronis Secure Backup not too long ago. I also setup Acronis SecureZone and allocated more space over time to keep up with incremental backups and what have you.
Well after I got a viral\malware based issue I worried that securezone might have backed up a rather iffy image and so proceeded to remove secure zone which had eaten about 100GB of space leaving me with a paltry 60GB which has about 5.5GB free. I released the used space by acronis and was a bit disappointed to find no change in capacity available on the C:/OS drive partition and that I only had about 17% left of free space.
I later found that I had to re-allocate the free space via Computer Mgmt in Ctrl panel, but it would only let me allocate a new drive letter to the space. So now I have a new drive with 100GB and my op system running near full and giving me hell. I tried to re-allocate the swap file to another partiton for extra flexibility and to hopefully avoid crummy performance due to an already cramped O.S drive.
I still have an almost full OS partition and the real bummer is that I have looked through all the folders that might be to blame, my pics folder is only 2.6 GB and music about 3GB if that. Barely any space taken by documents. I have run CCleaner and no change. What is taking up all my space. I did have an instance of Inst.exe that ComboFix got rid of. I'm not a porn site addict and I don't visit casino sites or any of the common sites known to be infested with crap and malware.
Any ideas of how to effectively and safely empty my HDD while keeping my documents, programs and nearest & dearest while avoiding a reinstall (I've read a clean re-install can alleviate many probs and is a good idea once or twice a year? - is a low level format such as Active killdisk good to do or will it reduce the life of the HDD? - i have read that low level formats should really be avoided where poss but are good for ensuring malware is wiped properly.)
Thank you so much for your time.
After wiping some egg off my face with Dell,I feel I may have more after this post, but honestly, I'm stumped...here's the S.P;
I have a 160GB HDD in my notebook and installed Acronis Secure Backup not too long ago. I also setup Acronis SecureZone and allocated more space over time to keep up with incremental backups and what have you.
Well after I got a viral\malware based issue I worried that securezone might have backed up a rather iffy image and so proceeded to remove secure zone which had eaten about 100GB of space leaving me with a paltry 60GB which has about 5.5GB free. I released the used space by acronis and was a bit disappointed to find no change in capacity available on the C:/OS drive partition and that I only had about 17% left of free space.
I later found that I had to re-allocate the free space via Computer Mgmt in Ctrl panel, but it would only let me allocate a new drive letter to the space. So now I have a new drive with 100GB and my op system running near full and giving me hell. I tried to re-allocate the swap file to another partiton for extra flexibility and to hopefully avoid crummy performance due to an already cramped O.S drive.
I still have an almost full OS partition and the real bummer is that I have looked through all the folders that might be to blame, my pics folder is only 2.6 GB and music about 3GB if that. Barely any space taken by documents. I have run CCleaner and no change. What is taking up all my space. I did have an instance of Inst.exe that ComboFix got rid of. I'm not a porn site addict and I don't visit casino sites or any of the common sites known to be infested with crap and malware.
Any ideas of how to effectively and safely empty my HDD while keeping my documents, programs and nearest & dearest while avoiding a reinstall (I've read a clean re-install can alleviate many probs and is a good idea once or twice a year? - is a low level format such as Active killdisk good to do or will it reduce the life of the HDD? - i have read that low level formats should really be avoided where poss but are good for ensuring malware is wiped properly.)
Thank you so much for your time.
Back to top
