Greetings -
First off, CCleaner is a great tool.
I believe I have a case of the common "free space suddenly used up" sickness because I didn't let CCleaner finish...
Yes, it was totally my fault, I just need help. I made a stupid mistake. Here is the story....
I started CCleaner. For *some reason*, I don't know why, I selected to Wipe Free Space. I am not selling the drive, nor do I have anything to hide. Something possessed me to Wipe Free Space It was also set on Gutmann 35 Pass, so from my understanding, it wreaked havoc on my hard drive's life? After about an hour, CCleaner was still at 15%, emptying the recycle bin. I AM NOT an impatient person, but I honestly thought it was hung up/frozen. I decided to close CCleaner, and then I got the warning message from Windows, "Only 60.0 KB left on your Hard drive".
At first I was really confused - 200 GB disappearing in under an hour! I did a Chkdsk, defrag, booted into my Ubuntu Partition (to check if Windows was displaying wrong information!) to no avail. I went over anything I did out-of-the-ordinary that day. Selecting "Wipe Free Space" was the only thing that came up. After some Googling and skimming through these forums, I see that it is a common problem. While I am not 105% sure that canceling the Wipe Free Space is the source of the problem, that seems to be the only plausible culprit.
But, I can't seem to find the "ZZZZZZZ" folders created by CCleaner. There is no new, odly named directory under C:, and I can't find anything through search. Please help? I have an Ubuntu Linux 11.04 partition, and some Ubuntu and PartedMagic LiveCDs at my disposal. I need to fix this problem!
Thanks so much,
ThunderBird
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500 GB HDD (more like 480 GB....)
421 GB Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit
~200 GB free before I ran CCleaner
~1 GB free after I canceled CCleaner
60 GB Ubuntu 11.04 (32 bit...I think? I'll check later, if needed)
Other, small recovery, utility partition(s), etc.
If you need to know more detailed information, please let me know.