Windows XP MCE 2005 Eating Disk Space... wtf?

[grivad]

I just came across a VERY strange problem today. I've been running MCE 2005 for a bit now, and it's eating up hard drive space on my main drive slowly but surely.. not only this, but it's misrepresenting disk usage pretty badly. I've run XP Pro up until MCE for years and never EVER had this problem before.. Reference these comments with the screenshot below.

1) Doing a a disk space check within the XP gui reports 24 gigs used, but when I check the sizes of each of the ONLY four folders on my HD, it reports roughly 11 gigs used. This plus my 1.5g pagefile is 12.5 gigs. Where the heck are the other 12 gigs being used???

2) doing a dir/a/s from the root directory on C:, it reports roughly 12.5 used as well (13,495..... used, bottom prompt window)

3) check the root directory to double check the pagefile size and anything else, 1.5g for the pagefile, nothing else fishy (1,610....., top prompt window)

Now here's the really strange thing.

I'm losing about a meg or more every second. If I sit at the prompt and do dir/a, every time my free space dwindles a bit.

I had left my comp on for days before I first noticed this happening today, before I started investigating, until the point where I had 0 bytes free on C. Once I restarted, everything was peachy, although I had about six gigs less free than I remembered having before.

I've now had my comp on for roughly 12 hours and have lost about 8 gigs. I'm sure when I restart I'll be good again.

Nothing fishy running in the background, no viruses after exhaustive checking... what the heck's going on??

EDIT: Another thing you'll probably notice is that when doing the dir/a/s in the prompt window (bottom one), it's reporting about 24 gigs total disk space. It's a 40 gig drive (37 gigs), which you can see in the disk usage for C. Again, wtf??

:

[BetaSith]

Check that MCE is not downloading video's. When you put that function on (unknown) it will ofcourse eat diskspace!

[grivad]

I'm pretty sure I've got that off, but how do I double check?

The other REALLY annoying/weird thing is though, it's still misrepresenting the total size of my hard drive, AND it has continued to diminish until I've had 0 bytes free in the past. That's 28 gigs free that I had that it ate up little by little, for no reason.. then when I restart, the free space is fine again..

And 28 gigs of videos?? hmm, that's doubtful =) Even if MCE was downloading stuff, that's a lot for it to download =) My machine/connection isn't even capable of downloading at a meg or two a second (which is the rate the disk space is diminishing).. and that still doesn't answer why it's showing incorrect size for my hard drive.

I also don't have a capture card or anything, so MCE isn't recording anything. If, and only IF it's downloading any videos, it'd be those ESPN snippets but those are what, five megs a pop at the most?

[grivad]

lost another 600 megs in the past 30 minutes...

AND

now dir/a/s is reporting total drive size as roughly 22 gigs.

SO weird. WHAT'S GOING ON?

[hulala.[uk]]

check how big is your %windir%\system32\LogFiles? if its empty then just ignore me...

[grivad]

nope, it's not that..

I just woke up and I now have 800 megs free.

dir/a/s is reporting total disk size as being 12 gigs.

What a total POS.. I can't believe this.

[bucketbuster]

Maybe it is System Restore??

[grivad]

I guess it could be system restore theoretically, although I don't know what it could be backing up..

This also doesn't explain my drive size shrinking.. (ie: going from 26 gigs total to 17 to 12 etc..)

I just gave up and installed XP Pro.. squeaky clean so far..

[DigeratiPrime]

You might be recording something, or even while watching tv MCE buffers it to the hard disk temporarily so you can pause/ff/rw/etc. That would be my guess.

[EDIT] no capture card, hmm]

you can nLite an Xp MCE disc, almost completely the same as a non-mce xp.

I've removed the following with nLite and it seems to work great.

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