Member Avatar for Alireza_021

last night i installed a game ( company of heroes) and then i uninstalled it because i didnt like it

after half an hour i saw a warning that said your windows drive is full
its not possible i had 5 gb of free space on my windows drive!

is it because of that game?
i checked recovery points and i didnt have any so it not windows recovery

i moved my files from windows drive to another drive and freed about 2gb but in 2seconds it was refilled again

im using windows vista sp1

help me!!!!

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Dani AI

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Because the C: drive shows as full only in normal mode (but not in Safe Mode), this points to a program or service that runs only in normal mode and is either creating large files or holding deleted files open. 's suggestion of malware is one valid possibility, but a benign process (installers, backup/patch software, or a runaway logger) can produce the same symptom. The goal is to identify which process or file is using the space before removing anything system-critical.

Quick diagnostic steps to follow (in this order):

  1. Watch live disk activity. Open Resource Monitor (resmon) -> Disk tab and sort by Total (or Processes with Disk Activity). Look for any process rapidly writing large amounts.
  2. Find the largest files (run from an elevated PowerShell to get a quick top-20): 
    Get-ChildItem -Path C:\ -Recurse -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue |
Where-Object {!$_.PSIsContainer} |
Sort-Object Length -Descending |
Select-Object FullName,@{Name='MB';Expression={[math]::Round($_.Length/1MB,2)}} -First 20
  3. Check Volume Shadow Copy usage (shadow copies can silently consume space): 
    vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin list shadows

If Resource Monitor shows heavy writes but you cannot find large files, a common cause is “deleted-but-still-open” files: a process removed a file from the directory but still holds a handle, so space remains used until the process exits. Use Process Explorer (run as Administrator) -> Find -> Find Handle or DLL… and search for large temp filenames or suspect locations. If you locate the process holding the space, restart that process (or reboot) to release it.

If a process keeps recreating files, scan in Safe Mode with an up-to-date anti‑malware tool (Safe Mode makes malware less active) and inspect these folders for big churn: C:\Windows\Temp, C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\Temp, C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download, and any backup or game installer folders. Avoid deleting unknown system files (pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys) without understanding the impact. If these steps don’t reveal the culprit, capture the top few writers from Resource Monitor and report their exact executable names for targeted next steps.

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Member Avatar for finito

Sorry this is a stupid question but is it possible that you are downloading or retrieving something?

Go to your drive and sort everything by Size, and go through the folders looking for what is taking up your space.

also look at your processer is it very busy? if so best to carry out this in Safe mode and post a thread in Nasties Section

Member Avatar for Alireza_021

no im not downloading anything
and i went to safe mode and in there i have 5 gb free space in my widows drive !!!

but in normal mode it is full

Member Avatar for finito

In that case, you may have some sort of malware.

This is not the section to be in. You want to follow the link on my earlier post. Read the documentation and follow the advice from there.

Regards.

Member Avatar for Alireza_021

thanks

commented: thanks for showing Appreciation +2
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