Ccleaner windows 7 wipe free space, drive space reserved(?)

[dimitrs]

Hi,

 

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).

 

How can I reclaim lost space?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

Dimitris

[Augeas]

There should be one or more large files in the root directory (c:\) with apparently random names. Delete these.

[dimitrs]

Unfortunately there are not any random files in C:\ in fact only hiberfil.sys and pagefile.sys files exist in c:\

I tried defraging but nothing.

I tried chkdsk after restart but nothing.

It seems that something is occupying space but not seen in either Windows Explorer and another File Management Program I tried (XYplorer)

[Alan_B]

TreeSize Free will show you what is consuming space.

I even identifies the size of files and folders within "System Volume Information" which increases dramatically during some actions.

[Augeas]

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.

[dimitrs]

Hi Augeas,

 

thanks for the replies.

I tried using treesize Free but still the same ... entire C: is ~85GB and I still have free 12GB instead of ~33-35.

When I used CCleaner first time, I tried to wipe free space withone pass zeros.

 

I will try recuva and see

[dimitrs]

OK

RECUVA did the trick.

It listed all non-deleted files and after sorting all the files by size I found it.

Eventually it had nothing to do with CCleaner at all.

There was an "h" file that showed up in windows as 0 size but had occupied 26GB of space.

It was after a convertion of VMWARE's ovftool that happened during the same time but I did not notice it and did not make the connection.

 

 

Thanks and sorry for the troubel

[Augeas]

That's fine, glad to hear a good result.

[Alan_B]

I suffered far worse with VMware.

 

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.

This also gained no response.

 

The above was in September 2011.

 

I never again used or trusted VMware.

I now prefer VBox

[dimitrs]

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.

 

Dimitris