Disappearing Hard Drive Space

Did you hear the one about the disappearing Hard Drive space?

One morning recently a client phoned to tell me everything was well with my recent repairs BUT she was now getting lots of strange error messages and the icons were disappearing from her desktop. She was unable to run many programs and the whole computer was acting very strangely.

When I arrived my client showed me a list of many error messages such as "out of memory" and "can not load ....." etc. When I started the computer I was greeted by new messages as well as a selection from the list.

Her husband had had trouble updating Norton Anti Virus so I immediately jumped to the conclusion that she had a virus. I tried to open Norton AV to check the virus list to determine the date of the virus signatures but was greeted by a message, Virus list not found.

Looks like a virus I claimed and so I re-booted the computer using a two diskette set which creates a RAM Drive and loads F-Prot (DOS version) to the RAM Drive. F-Prot is a powerful Virus detection utility and in this setup has the advantage that the computer can be scanned for viruses without windows operating. I keep this diskette set up to date every 10 days or so and was hoping to find a recent virus on the computer.. There was no such luck. With the diskette removed I re-booted the computer and watched all the error messages as windows loaded. I tried to look at the Device Manager but this refused to load correctly and then all the icons disappeared from the desktop.

A subsequent re-boot and an examination with My Computer of the hard drive space produced an unbelievable result. The computer was fitted with a 3.2 GB Hard Drive BUT only 600 KB! (0.06GB) was left free. No wonder there was such an array of error messages. The fact that it ran at all surprised me. I immediately examined the C:\Windows\Temp folder to see what temporary files and folders were present. Although I had only worked on this computer within the last six weeks and cleaned up the basics there was now over 100 MB of temporary files and folders.

Many programs contribute to temporary files being left on the hard drive in this folder. Some printer errors, poorly written software and every e-mail attachment you open direct from Outlook Express is copied here in order to open the attachment. Many software installation routines extract the files from the installation CD-ROM to this folder and the actual configuration and setup is run from this location. Unfortunately many installations do not clean up after their routine is finished leaving behind folders with a names such as -istmp0.dir or wzsb340.tmp or similar.

When I tried to delete a series of useless folders the computer locked up and I discovered after yet another re-boot that I could only delete a few files at a time. This effect is not normal but no doubt cause by the serious lack of free hard drive space. Once I had more than 5MB free I was able to delete large block of files and folders. The final result was only 115 MB free. Whilst this did not immediately trouble me I was a little concerned that I had worked on this computer recently and not informed the client that their hard drive was almost full but the best surprise was yet to come.

Once I re-booted all the error messages disappeared except for one referring to a program I was not familiar with, CyberWarner.exe unable to load. I put this to one side whilst I showed the client how to use the excellent Live Update feature of Norton Anti Virus to download via the Internet the latest virus signatures. This procedure is slow however once initiated by the user is automatic. The update took about 10 minutes and my client was happy she would be able to do it herself in the future.

The only remaining problem was the error message concerning CyberWarner.exe not able to load. I was able to locate this program on the hard drive and determine that it was indeed corrupted. It appeared as though it must have been supplied with the computer and appeared to be some type of fall back logging program to repair the computer in the event of critical files being deleted. I noticed a subfolder under the C:\Cyberwarner folder labelled Backups and just as well I did because unbelievable as it may seem there was over 1.30 GB! of back up files in there. These files were in a special format which I can only guess is used by the program to restore from corruptions. To my horror I noticed there was over 20 MB of backups in the 60 minutes I had been working on the computer. The program was obviously out of control. Free space currently had dropped to below 95MB. More curious now I discovered that the 1.30GB consisting of 1000's of back up files had only started eight days ago. This was a staggering 160MB for every day.

The computer came with a special restore CD-ROM of the type that overwrites the whole hard drive which presumably would contain CyberWarner. I decided that pursuing the restoration of CyberWarner to its correct operation was not worth the effort. My client agreed. As this program was not able to be removed through the control panel due to corruption I simply removed the folder and its backup sub folder (all the DLL's (dynamically linked library) files) were in this folder. I removed the run entry from the registry which was responsible for starting this program on boot-up. My client was happy to recover 1.5 GB of hard drive space. This would be more than enough for her needs well into the future.

A subsequent check on the Internet revealed that this software is supplied as to OEM Computer manufacturers such as Packard Bell and is also available for purchase. Its normal function is similar to the auto protection to be found in the Windows XP operating system which protects system and other critical files.