Disappearing Disk space

[frez]

Dear Tech Gurus:

I am running W2K with SP4, with Norton Antivirus 2006 and the latest free ZoneAlarm.

I suddenly have an issue with disappearing Disk Space on my C drive.

A couple of days ago I had 400 MB of space free and later on in the day, it mysteriously dropped down to 10MB. Because I needed the space and could not find the source of the problem, I uninstalled some programs and brought it back up to 500MB yesterday. Today, the size has mysteriously dropped down to 7MB.

I ran Treesize pro, but it is not showing me any folders that are uncharacteristically large.

My Pagefile is setup on a different drive than C.

Temp is mostly empty.

Ad-Aware reports nothing out of the ordinary.

Any ideas?

[frez]

SOLVED.

Noticed that the total folder amounts in TreeSize did not match the size of the disk. There was a 2.5GB discrepency. The only folder that TreeSize couldn't access was C:\System Volume Information and voila - oodles of of multi hundred megabyte files in the catalog.wci folder that had very recent dates.

After a little research on the web and I discovered that this is all related to the Indexing Service that one can turn on in the Search tab of Explorer. It looked so innocent a week ago, that I turned it on, while I was doing a search - and it winded up using 2.5GB and filling up my C drive.

Anyhow - I've turned off the Indexing Service in the Ctl Panel/Admin Tools/Services. Ran ciadv.msc from START>Run and selected the Catalog, RMB Menu and selected New Tasks > Empty Catalog. Went inside the Catalog (and the Directories folder) and deleted all of the entries for the individual drives. To finish up I went into C:\System Volume Information and removed the catalog.wci folder and I've got my space back. Rebooted and I'm fine.

Just in case this is useful to anyone else.