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

**jcgriff2** · 10-30-2008, 11:20 AM

H Jimmy. . .

Welcome to TSF Vista SUpport.

I know exactly what you are talking about with Vista Junctions. If an app uses hard-coded directory (folder) names from the XP era and is now running in Vista, the Junctions will take it for the ride of its life usually down to about 17 directories deep - depending on the length of the dir name.

I need to know if you are Vista x64 or x86 and was it an XP upgrade?

If you are Vista x64 and the program that you ran is an x86 app, the results are useless b/c of virtualization and 3 folder in particular that can and sometimes cannot be found within the Windows directory - \system32, \syswow64, \sysnative.

Please get me a screenshot of Disk Management -
START | type diskmgmt.msc & hit enter | be sure to expand screen so all can be seen

Also, run these commands line-by-line from an elevated Administrative command prompt ("DOS") -
START | type cmd.exe into the start search box | right-click on cmd.exe above | select Run as Administrator | the black "DOS" screen will appear | copy.paste the following (to paste - right-click at the very top of DOS screen, select Edit, select Paste) - hit enter after each if necessary:

Code:

cd\users

Code:

tree /a /f  > "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-f.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-f.txt"

Code:

tree /a   > "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-only.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-only.txt"

Code:

dir /a /n /s  > "%userprofile%\documents\dir_users_10-30-08_a-n-s.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\dir_users_10-30-08_a-n-s.txt"

A notepad will open after each command so you can see contents. The 3 text files can be found in your documents folder - please get them, zip them up and attach to your next post. The last command may take >30 seconds to run, so if DOS screen appears hung, just give it some time.

Any ? - please let me know.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

.

**jcgriff2** · 10-30-2008, 11:27 AM

Jimmy,

I noticed that you edited the title of this thread to "DUP THREAD... please ignore.." - but I already deleted the other one. So I renamed this one back to the original thread name. It is again a live Vista thread.

JC

Daggett · 10-30-2008, 03:14 PM

JC,

First off, I really appreciate the quick reply. I guess the forums take a bit of time to update so thanks for deleting the duplicate thread.

My operating system is Vista 32bit (x86). I inherited this laptop from a family member (hence, the john username) but I'm quite certain that it came preloaded with Vista so it's not an XP upgrade.

As the files you requested contain a large amount of personal info, I uploaded them to a transfer web site and sent you the link via pm. Let me know what you make of them.

Jimmy

**jcgriff2** · 10-31-2008, 06:07 AM

Hi Jimmy. . .

I picked up the zip file and took a quick look at the 3 txt files, but need to further review them. There are quite a few files in the one user account - I saw that one sub-directory alone contains nearly 1gb of avi files. The entire \users folder is just under 6gb, per the "dir" cmd output. There is no "correct" amount of space figures here - my \users folder is just over 3gb. But I store a ton of files elsewhere. I do hope that you have all of those important education-related files backed up somewhere. It not, I would advise that you consider doing so via external USB HDD. If the drive were to fail or if some event occurred that required the re-install of Vista, you would lose all of them.

My first encounter with Junctions was on a Vista x86 system. If you click on a junction, it will simply re-direct you to the junction point. If that happens to be the same folder you thought you just came from, that is exactly what is happening. You are ending up at the start-point when you click on \appdata. See another post that I wrote in March 2008 on Junctions. ALso here are 2 screen shots for you:

. .

What was the amount of space calculated by the programs you ran for the \users folder? It seems that you may have had some system issues back on September 9 as I noticed the existence of two 3rd party memory dumps & 2 exception reports in the folder

Code:

 C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Electronic Arts\SPORE\Sporebin

See if you can find these 4 files -

Code:

Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 03.11.26 exception.txt
Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 03.11.26 minidump.mdmp
Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 18.17.45 exception.txt
Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 18.17.45 minidump.mdmp

The folder name if you noticed contains "VirtualStore\Program Files" - and it is in fact the virtual copy of the \Program Files folder. Any changes made to a virtualized program's files are written to the Virtual Store and not to \Program Files\<program name> itself. These dump-related files are too small to be Vista mini kernel dumps so I assume that they were originally written to what the crash cart thought was the \Program Files folder, but ended up in the Virtual Store.

Also take a look in WERCON - Windows Problem Reports and Solutions
START | type wercon & hit enter | start with "see problems to check" or the history. I noticed there were several WER folders in the \users area.

Regards. . .

JC

.

Daggett · 11-08-2008, 02:51 PM

hey JC. Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy this week. A program I ran called JDiskReport shows that Users is taking up 5 GB (I did delete a few things since last week).

As I said before, I can only click on the junction inside the WinPE environment, it doesn't let me in Vista Explorer. I'm not sure if what it's showing me in WinPE is actually just redirecting back to itself or not because there aren't infinite nested appdata folders. The amount of nested appdata folders is finite, and the extra space of these folders is showing up (or the space of the same folder is being recalculated, im not sure).

The four files you found were probably created when I was playing "Spore" awhile back. My system crashed several times while playing, I took this to be a bug in the game and have uninstalled it since. I've uploaded the four files and sent them to you via pm.

I also included two sets of files I found through WERCON that were generated several months ago. The report was labeled under "Windows" and the problem was "Shut down unexpectedly"

Jimmy

**jcgriff2** · 11-11-2008, 02:45 AM

Hi Jimmy. . .

Time is never a problem. Get done what you need to and this can all be picked up at a near-moments notice.

Yes, the \users\guest\AppData\Local is a Junction named \Application Data and if you click on it - it will take you to c:\users\guest\appdata\local
where you will see the same folder \application data angain. It goes in circles w/ no space eaten by it.

If you bring up an elevated admin prompt - you'll see the Junction:
START | type cmd.exe | right-click and select Run as Admin - copy/paste (right-click at top of DOS screen, select Edit, paste):

Code:

dir c:\users\guest\appdata\local /a /r > %temp%\g1.txt & start notepad %temp%\g1.txt

Your result s/b similar to this:

Code:

 Volume in drive C has no label.
 Volume Serial Number is B648-8B6C

 Directory of c:\users\guest\appdata\local

11/11/2008  02:42 AM    <DIR>          .
11/11/2008  02:42 AM    <DIR>          ..
11/11/2008  02:33 AM    <JUNCTION>     Application Data [C:\Users\Guest\AppData\Local]
11/11/2008  02:36 AM                 0 AtStart.txt
11/11/2008  02:36 AM                 0 DSwitch.txt
11/11/2008  02:36 AM            76,064 GDIPFONTCACHEV1.DAT
11/11/2008  02:39 AM    <DIR>          Google
11/11/2008  02:33 AM    <JUNCTION>     History [C:\Users\Guest\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\History]
11/11/2008  02:42 AM         1,480,096 IconCache.db
11/11/2008  02:36 AM    <DIR>          Microsoft
10/24/2008  12:34 AM    <DIR>          Microsoft Help
11/11/2008  02:36 AM                 0 QSwitch.txt
11/11/2008  02:36 AM    <DIR>          Temp
11/11/2008  02:34 AM    <JUNCTION>     Temporary Internet Files [C:\Users\Guest\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files]
11/11/2008  02:40 AM    <DIR>          VirtualStore
               5 File(s)      1,556,160 bytes
              10 Dir(s)  130,476,003,328 bytes free

You can see Junction in red; the alternate data stream (where it will take you) in blue.

Re: the dump files -
Two of the dumps from Auigust 4 were in fact Vista mini kernel dumps. The bugchecks on both -
0x00000116 (0x84a84510, 0x8c009ca0, 0xc0000001, 0x3), with the probable cause listed as the Intel Display x86 driver igdkmd32.sys.

A 0x116 bugcheck = VIDEO_TDR_ ERROR and indicates that an attempt to reset the display driver and recover from a timeout failed. They were all dated

The other dumps were program-created and not readable fully by the Microsoft dbug software and were dated September 9, 2008. As of the crash date, your Intel driver had a timestamp of Mon Nov 06 13:29:12 2006. You can check to see if an update is availble from Intel HERE. If the crashes return, let me know.

Please see my PM on the next course of action here as your files do contain quite a bit of personal information.

The dbug log is attached.

Regards. . .

jcgriff2

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.

10-30-2008, 11:20 AM	#2 (permalink)
jcgriff2 Moderator, Microsoft Support Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Palm Springs, California Posts: 9,802 OS: Windows 7, Vista Ultimate My System	Re: duplicate thread - please ignore H Jimmy. . . Welcome to TSF Vista SUpport. I know exactly what you are talking about with Vista Junctions. If an app uses hard-coded directory (folder) names from the XP era and is now running in Vista, the Junctions will take it for the ride of its life usually down to about 17 directories deep - depending on the length of the dir name. I need to know if you are Vista x64 or x86 and was it an XP upgrade? If you are Vista x64 and the program that you ran is an x86 app, the results are useless b/c of virtualization and 3 folder in particular that can and sometimes cannot be found within the Windows directory - \system32, \syswow64, \sysnative. Please get me a screenshot of Disk Management - START \| type diskmgmt.msc & hit enter \| be sure to expand screen so all can be seen Also, run these commands line-by-line from an elevated Administrative command prompt ("DOS") - START \| type cmd.exe into the start search box \| right-click on cmd.exe above \| select Run as Administrator \| the black "DOS" screen will appear \| copy.paste the following (to paste - right-click at the very top of DOS screen, select Edit, select Paste) - hit enter after each if necessary: Code: cd\users Code: tree /a /f > "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-f.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-f.txt" Code: tree /a > "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-only.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\tree_users_10-30-08_a-only.txt" Code: dir /a /n /s > "%userprofile%\documents\dir_users_10-30-08_a-n-s.txt" & start notepad "%userprofile%\documents\dir_users_10-30-08_a-n-s.txt" A notepad will open after each command so you can see contents. The 3 text files can be found in your documents folder - please get them, zip them up and attach to your next post. The last command may take >30 seconds to run, so if DOS screen appears hung, just give it some time. Any ? - please let me know. Regards. . . jcgriff2 . __________________ . . . . . . . . BSOD Posting Instructions B Expecting a reply and waiting > 36 hours ? Send a PM to me containing a link to your thread My availability will be limited through ~ October 2009

10-30-2008, 11:27 AM	#3 (permalink)
jcgriff2 Moderator, Microsoft Support Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Palm Springs, California Posts: 9,802 OS: Windows 7, Vista Ultimate My System	Re: interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space Jimmy, I noticed that you edited the title of this thread to "DUP THREAD... please ignore.." - but I already deleted the other one. So I renamed this one back to the original thread name. It is again a live Vista thread. JC __________________ . . . . . . . . BSOD Posting Instructions B Expecting a reply and waiting > 36 hours ? Send a PM to me containing a link to your thread My availability will be limited through ~ October 2009

10-30-2008, 03:14 PM	#4 (permalink)
Daggett Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 4 OS: Vista SP1	Re: interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space JC, First off, I really appreciate the quick reply. I guess the forums take a bit of time to update so thanks for deleting the duplicate thread. My operating system is Vista 32bit (x86). I inherited this laptop from a family member (hence, the john username) but I'm quite certain that it came preloaded with Vista so it's not an XP upgrade. As the files you requested contain a large amount of personal info, I uploaded them to a transfer web site and sent you the link via pm. Let me know what you make of them. Jimmy

10-31-2008, 06:07 AM	#5 (permalink)
jcgriff2 Moderator, Microsoft Support Join Date: Sep 2007 Location: Palm Springs, California Posts: 9,802 OS: Windows 7, Vista Ultimate My System	Re: interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space Hi Jimmy. . . I picked up the zip file and took a quick look at the 3 txt files, but need to further review them. There are quite a few files in the one user account - I saw that one sub-directory alone contains nearly 1gb of avi files. The entire \users folder is just under 6gb, per the "dir" cmd output. There is no "correct" amount of space figures here - my \users folder is just over 3gb. But I store a ton of files elsewhere. I do hope that you have all of those important education-related files backed up somewhere. It not, I would advise that you consider doing so via external USB HDD. If the drive were to fail or if some event occurred that required the re-install of Vista, you would lose all of them. My first encounter with Junctions was on a Vista x86 system. If you click on a junction, it will simply re-direct you to the junction point. If that happens to be the same folder you thought you just came from, that is exactly what is happening. You are ending up at the start-point when you click on \appdata. See another post that I wrote in March 2008 on Junctions. ALso here are 2 screen shots for you: . . What was the amount of space calculated by the programs you ran for the \users folder? It seems that you may have had some system issues back on September 9 as I noticed the existence of two 3rd party memory dumps & 2 exception reports in the folder Code: C:\Users\john\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Electronic Arts\SPORE\Sporebin See if you can find these 4 files - Code: Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 03.11.26 exception.txt Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 03.11.26 minidump.mdmp Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 18.17.45 exception.txt Exception Report JOHN-PC 09-09-08 18.17.45 minidump.mdmp The folder name if you noticed contains "VirtualStore\Program Files" - and it is in fact the virtual copy of the \Program Files folder. Any changes made to a virtualized program's files are written to the Virtual Store and not to \Program Files\<program name> itself. These dump-related files are too small to be Vista mini kernel dumps so I assume that they were originally written to what the crash cart thought was the \Program Files folder, but ended up in the Virtual Store. Also take a look in WERCON - Windows Problem Reports and Solutions START \| type wercon & hit enter \| start with "see problems to check" or the history. I noticed there were several WER folders in the \users area. Regards. . . JC . __________________ . . . . . . . . BSOD Posting Instructions B Expecting a reply and waiting > 36 hours ? Send a PM to me containing a link to your thread My availability will be limited through ~ October 2009

11-08-2008, 02:51 PM	#6 (permalink)
Daggett Registered User Join Date: Oct 2008 Posts: 4 OS: Vista SP1	Re: interesting junction problem - hard drive showing wrong amount of free disk space hey JC. Sorry for the late reply, I've been a bit busy this week. A program I ran called JDiskReport shows that Users is taking up 5 GB (I did delete a few things since last week). As I said before, I can only click on the junction inside the WinPE environment, it doesn't let me in Vista Explorer. I'm not sure if what it's showing me in WinPE is actually just redirecting back to itself or not because there aren't infinite nested appdata folders. The amount of nested appdata folders is finite, and the extra space of these folders is showing up (or the space of the same folder is being recalculated, im not sure). The four files you found were probably created when I was playing "Spore" awhile back. My system crashed several times while playing, I took this to be a bug in the game and have uninstalled it since. I've uploaded the four files and sent them to you via pm. I also included two sets of files I found through WERCON that were generated several months ago. The report was labeled under "Windows" and the problem was "Shut down unexpectedly" Jimmy