I have used ccleaner for quite some time and recently I wanted to wipe my laptops free space.
I started the process at 36GB free space on my 128GB SSD disk on my Windows 7 pro x64 laptop.
After wiping MFT ccleaner started to wipe free space and it said it had around 5 hours.
At some point I had to cancel the operation cause I was running out of battery and restarted afterwards.
The free space was at 12GB, I thought it would be freed after succesfull completion so I restarted the wipe process and after it finished it went back to having only 12GB free space.
Where is this space occupied from ? I select all files from C:\ Drive (including hidden and system files) and I get only 85GB of files.
But my laptop still shows 12GB free as if the entire space is around 106GB ... (total is 118GB).
I've just noticed that you're using an SSD. I hope you ran WFS with one pass of zeroes? It is a suspiciously long time to wipe 35 gb once.
If you have Recuva installed check the Show Non-Deleted Files option and run it. Click on the file size column header to sort by file size. You may be able to see any large files created at the time you ran CC. Or sort the Last Modified column and check the files against the date you ran CC.
If you run WFS in future then only use one pass. I wouldn't run Wipe MFT either, this is very heavy on writes and gains little. If your SSD is TRIM enabled then don't run WFS at all, TRIM will do it for you.
I created a virtual PC on my secondary HDD E:\ by using VMware.
A virtual action resulted in VMware reducing my System partition free space from 8.78 GB down to 250 MB,
It was fortunate that when I closed the virtual machine I then saw a large RED BAR on Windows Explorer showing that C:\ was badly damaged,
and I was able to find (with Treesize) that VMware had dumped almost 9 GB into %TEMP%,
and I was then able to purge it before closing down for the day.
I have doubts about the ability of Windows to boot up cleanly if it has only 250 MB of free space.
I started a topic on their forum asking advice on how to avoid a repetition.of this "memory leak" and received no response.
After two weeks I bumped and still got no response
I started another topic on their forum complaining that their VM system failed to protect my REAL computer from any malware that might be delivered to my Virtual PC.
Its kind of funny but the convertion of my laptop's (vmware) vm's via [vmware player ovftool] was done in order for them to be used by vbox on both my PC and Macbook.
Out of three convertions, two were completed ok but both were unusable by virtual box (the virtual drive created by vm and the .ovf file were garbage) ... and one failed.
The failed one was most likely the reason it got the 0 byte file (26gb actual) issue on my ssd.
Eventually I converted them from within vbox by attaching the original vmdk.
The cleanup/wipe was done in order to securely wipe the vm traces.
I started wiping after the removal of the vm's from the ssd (at 36gb free space), stopped cause of battery and resumed after I did the ovf convertion through the usb 3.0 disk.
I failed to realize that the space was changed since ovftool failed.
I later noticed only 12gb free and thought that the cancelled wipe process did that, so in order to reclaim the space I retried the wipe process.
After the succesfull wipe I still got 12GB so something didn;t go as planned.
I wasn;t 100% sure if ithe culprit was ccleaner (thats why there is a questionmark in my original post) but a windows search for recent changed files didn't reveal any other changes so I assumed it should be a hidden/sys file created by ccleaner ...
Once again, thanks for the help and the valuable info.