Stopped WFS scan

CCleaner for Windows
1

My wife stopped a WFS scan in mid scan and now she has almost all of her HDD full. 20Gb free out of 1Tb to be exact. I had to fight to get that 20Gb so that SOME action could be taken. Apparently CCleaner makes these millions of little files in order to wipe the free space. Such as ~0001, ~0002, ~0003 etc. But now they are all over the hard drive and CCleaner refuses to remove them. Can you help and tell us what exactly we need to do to free up her drive space? Thank you.

2

g'day ithubby and welcome.

you can either let CC complete the WFS and it'll delete them for you, or you can manually select and delete them (then empty the Recycle Bin).

3

Hello. I've tried running it a couple of times, and it is all still there. There are TONS of those files and I'm not sure of the extent and which I can actually delete and not do damage. Any thing more you can suggest?

4

have you rebooted the PC yet?, that MAY get rid of them.

if not, you can safely delete them. 

the way CC wipes free space is to create hundreds of files to fill up your drive then it deletes them.


when you aborted that process mid-run, they were left behind.

they should all be in the root folder of your C: drive, yes? 

fire up File Explorer and select them and delete them.

5
11 hours ago, ithubby said: 
<div class="ipsQuote_contents">
	<p>
		Apparently CCleaner makes these <strong>millions of <span style="color:#c0392b;">little</span> files</strong> in order to wipe the free space. Such as ~0001, ~0002, ~0003 etc. But now <strong>they are all over the hard drive</strong> and CCleaner refuses to remove them.
	</p>
</div>

Wipe Free Space should not be making millions of little files! It should be making large sized files, and all of those files should only be located directly in the root of the hard disk, example: C:\

Are you certain some other software (or malware) didn't create those files instead?

6

Sorry it took so long to respond;

I was able to delete all of the files concerned. It was easier than I thought. But that cured the problem. Thank you so much for the assistance. =D