Disk Wiper changes used space on the HD

Hi there,

I wonder if anyone can help me?

I'm running Windows 7 Ultimate 32-bit OS, on a Intel Presscott 4 CPU, 3.02 GHz, hyperthreaded, 2.00 GB of RAM, with C:/ as the primary drive.

Originally there was 124 GB free of a 150 GB on the Hitachi SCSI internal HD. This is the primary and only internal HD.

I ran the CCleaner's "Disk Wiper" to clear out/overwrite free (unused space) on the C:/ drive. I set it to just overwrite once. As the wiper ran the used space of the drive kept going up & up, so in the end I only had 10 GB free of 150 GB when looking in the My Computer window. It just kept eating into the drive!

I couldn't even find out where all this massive "additional data" was being stored. The drive's so full it won't even defragment!

1) What's happening here? i.e. Why is so much of the space on the HD used up when CCleaner runs the Disk Wiper to overwrite free space on the HD?

2) Can I reclaim all this lost space, and get it back to normal?

Thanks so much in anticipation!

Yours,

-James

That's how disk wiping works. CC will create one or more large files to fill the disk completely, then delete them. Did you let the wfs process complete? If you still have the large files in the root directory they can be deleted. They have some long gibberish (sorry, Piriform) file names.

Hi Augeas,

I let the wfs finish, and as per your suggestion I found a very oddly named directory (3590F75ABA9E485486C100C1A9D4FF06TFVLFRAGSVVGWVPY) with hundreds of compressed files indide all named ZZZZ..ZZZZZZ.ZZZ or similar. I deleted that from the root and that fixed the issue.

Thanks so much for your help. I didn't know that that's how CCleaner does the wipe.

-James