Solved Hard Drive RANDOMLY filling up

Randomly my computer (running Windows 8) told me that I had 74MB of space left.

WHAT?!?! Last time I checked I had at least 200GB free.

I recently downloaded Gary's Mod on Steam and Photoshop CS2, but I've maybe added 20GB of games...and mere MBs of images.

I tried deleting a 5GB movie, and when I did, it said I had 5 GB free, and then in a few minutes, it said I had 560KB of space left.

Did a desk cleanup recently, defragmented, virus scan with Windows Defender, and did a lookup of the largest files on my had drive. No significant change.

What is going on??

Thank you so much for your help,

David

anything showing up in disk management?

and i realise im stating the obvious here but have you tried uninstaling garys mod ? (i used to love playing around with that its been out years )

WAIT I found the offending file. It's Windows.edb in C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows. It's growing like crazy for no reason!!

I've tried to change how Windows indexes search but it didn't fix the problem.

Apparently this is a problem when you clean install from 7 to 8???

how do I fix this?

Found the solution (I think)

1) Search for "Indexing Options" (under "Settings"). Open it.
2) Search "services" (or run "services.msc") and find "Windows Search". Stop the service.
3) Delete the Windows.edb file
4) Click "Modify" in the already-open "Indexing Options" panel, then click "Delete and Rebuild" for the index. You can also specify a different drive to store the index on.


Hope that helps.

Click to expand...

Found it on this thread: How to clear out the Windows.edb file in Windows 8 - Microsoft Community

its odd that a clean install creates any issues , an upgrade maybe but clean install is the way to go usually. Glad its sorted!

This was very helpful to me. For 6 months, I was trying to find an answer to this, but nothing.

Quick one, is stopping the "windows search" going to change any thing on the PC. Like, in a lay man's term, "Any side effects"?

Monyi said:

This was very helpful to me. For 6 months, I was trying to find an answer to this, but nothing.

Quick one, is stopping the "windows search" going to change any thing on the PC. Like, in a lay man's term, "Any side effects"?

Click to expand...

Yes. If you disable search you'll not be able to search within documents. If you have search enabled you can look for "Village Hall Budget" inside all of your Word, Excel or PDF documents. If you don't index then you can't - you'll only be able to look at the title which might be "Budget 2015.xls" and not mention anything else.

Whether you care about searching for words inside your documents is of course up to you.

Thank you for this information. It is very helpful.

Monyi said:

Thank you for this information. It is very helpful.

Click to expand...

I hope so. Keeping the index is very useful (I think so anyway).

If you are worried about disk space you would be better looking at https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/ and see if there is something big.

I have a 500 GB hard drive on my Toshiba Laptop and noticed that it was filling up and couldn't figure it out. Checked all files and folders but couldn't account for why my C: drive was so full. After reading articles in this forum I downloaded windirstat and ran it. It only took a few minutes to realize that my Kaspersky AV program was continually loading virus definitions and updates constantly. I used windirstat to delete over 300 GB of redundant files. Ran Ccleaner and optimized my drive. Thanks to all who posted on this topic you were all a great help to me.
Cheers.