Tech Support Forum - View Single Post - interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space

Daggett · 10-30-2008, 10:45 AM

Hi everyone. My name is Jimmy. I'm using a lenovo 3000 n100 laptop running windows vista with SP1. Recently I noticed that my 100GB hard drive was running out of space. So I deleted nearly all my space-hogging applications and media. Windows explorer said there was still being around 70GB being used. Since I had only a few GB of documents/media and no huge programs, I suspected that this was wrong.

I proceeded to "clean up" my disk space: deleting temporary files with windows disk cleaner, running the chkdsk utility, doing a complete defrag. I deleted all but my last system restore point, deleted my hibernation files, and checked shadow copy (shadowcopy was only using about 1GB of space... not the culprit). I ran CCleaner and then full scans of Windows Defender, AVG, and Spybot S&D.

All of this freed up about 10GB, but explorer said there was still supposedly a whopping 60GB taken up on my 100GB hard disk. Highlighting and selecting the properties of all the files in C, even with hidden files & super hidden files enabled, said it was about 25GB. I also downloaded a program called JDiskReport which calculates disk usage and, affirming my suspicions, JDiskReport showed about 27GB of usage.

http://img243.imageshack.us/my.php?i...0389232mt5.jpg

So, why then the difference of 30GB between windows explorer and jdiskreport? Someone recommended that I boot from a disk or another OS and examine my C drive from there. So, I booted my laptop from WinPE on a USB drive and looked at my hard drive from the WinPE explorer. Like windows explorer, WinPE told me that I was using 60GB of disk space instead of the 30GB space I was actually using. Poking around in the folders, I narrowed the discrepancy to the Users folder.

I found that my problem was in each user's "AppData" folder. What should have been about 50MB of data inside Users/guest/AppData/Local was actually several GB. What should have been about 1GB inside Users/john/AppData/Local was about 25GB!! This problem occured in every folder with an AppData folder: "all users", "guest", "default", "default user", and "john" (my username).

Looking inside the folder, WinPE explorer showed (using the john folder as an example) dozens of AppData folders nested within each other inside of "Local". Each nested folder had all of the file contents of the original Local folder. Since the Local folder had about 1 GB of data and there were about 25 nested ones, this ballooned to 25GB. For example, I could go into C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\AppData\AppData\AppData\AppData etc with each AppData having the same duplicated contents.

After a bit of research I found that there is a junction inside Local which redirects back up to AppData for backwards compatibility purposes. The duplicated files I see then should not actually be duplicates but just multiple mirrors of the same file. Deleting some of the files in WinPE affirms this as deleting the file in AppData\Local deletes all of the nested ones also. I tried creating a new user and the problem persisted in the new user's folder also.

I guess basically, my problem is that the files in my AppData folder are being counted dozens of times when calculating disk space. This leads to a difference of 30GB than what I'm actually using, which is a big difference when my hard disk is only 100GB large.

So, I would like to figure out what's causing this problem and how to fix it. If anyone has any ideas of how to move forward, that would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

Jimmy

10-30-2008, 10:45 AM	#1 (permalink)
Daggett Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 4 OS: Vista SP1	interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space Hi everyone. My name is Jimmy. I'm using a lenovo 3000 n100 laptop running windows vista with SP1. Recently I noticed that my 100GB hard drive was running out of space. So I deleted nearly all my space-hogging applications and media. Windows explorer said there was still being around 70GB being used. Since I had only a few GB of documents/media and no huge programs, I suspected that this was wrong. I proceeded to "clean up" my disk space: deleting temporary files with windows disk cleaner, running the chkdsk utility, doing a complete defrag. I deleted all but my last system restore point, deleted my hibernation files, and checked shadow copy (shadowcopy was only using about 1GB of space... not the culprit). I ran CCleaner and then full scans of Windows Defender, AVG, and Spybot S&D. All of this freed up about 10GB, but explorer said there was still supposedly a whopping 60GB taken up on my 100GB hard disk. Highlighting and selecting the properties of all the files in C, even with hidden files & super hidden files enabled, said it was about 25GB. I also downloaded a program called JDiskReport which calculates disk usage and, affirming my suspicions, JDiskReport showed about 27GB of usage. http://img243.imageshack.us/my.php?i...0389232mt5.jpg So, why then the difference of 30GB between windows explorer and jdiskreport? Someone recommended that I boot from a disk or another OS and examine my C drive from there. So, I booted my laptop from WinPE on a USB drive and looked at my hard drive from the WinPE explorer. Like windows explorer, WinPE told me that I was using 60GB of disk space instead of the 30GB space I was actually using. Poking around in the folders, I narrowed the discrepancy to the Users folder. I found that my problem was in each user's "AppData" folder. What should have been about 50MB of data inside Users/guest/AppData/Local was actually several GB. What should have been about 1GB inside Users/john/AppData/Local was about 25GB!! This problem occured in every folder with an AppData folder: "all users", "guest", "default", "default user", and "john" (my username). Looking inside the folder, WinPE explorer showed (using the john folder as an example) dozens of AppData folders nested within each other inside of "Local". Each nested folder had all of the file contents of the original Local folder. Since the Local folder had about 1 GB of data and there were about 25 nested ones, this ballooned to 25GB. For example, I could go into C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\AppData\AppData\AppData\AppData etc with each AppData having the same duplicated contents. After a bit of research I found that there is a junction inside Local which redirects back up to AppData for backwards compatibility purposes. The duplicated files I see then should not actually be duplicates but just multiple mirrors of the same file. Deleting some of the files in WinPE affirms this as deleting the file in AppData\Local deletes all of the nested ones also. I tried creating a new user and the problem persisted in the new user's folder also. I guess basically, my problem is that the files in my AppData folder are being counted dozens of times when calculating disk space. This leads to a difference of 30GB than what I'm actually using, which is a big difference when my hard disk is only 100GB large. So, I would like to figure out what's causing this problem and how to fix it. If anyone has any ideas of how to move forward, that would be very much appreciated. Thanks! Jimmy Last edited by Daggett; 10-30-2008 at 10:53 AM.