System process eating all free space

The free space on my C drive is shrinking slowly down to 0 every time I restart. I have 1.33GB free when I turn the computer on, but the "System" process slowly eats it all up.

My pagefile is set to stay at 1GB, system restore is off, indexing is off, all temp folders on the C drive are more of less empty. The only file on the C drive over 200MB is the pagefile.

Anyone have any thoughts on how to get "System" to stop eating free space up?

Here's a screenshot


Disk usage doesn't match. I selected every file and folder on the C drive on the left, and the right is the drive properties. THe difference in used space is equal to I/O Write Bytes for "System"

 

I have never heard of processes or windows consuming hard drive space (although consuming memory happens often). I think that you have a virus...I would back up immediately and seek to reformat your machine.

 

Well, Windows itself takes over 5gb, if you only have 7gb of space available it might be running low on its own. Even if your temp files are basically empty, the computer needs a little free space to move around and read/write to the drive. Maybe windows is having a hard time doing so with so little free space.

 

My system process is currently showing "103,574,016" I/O write bytes, but my free space doesn't change. Does this disk space reappear when you restart? Have you used Filemon from sysinternals to see which files are being opened, and what actually is filling that space? Because I have a svchost.exe process that has written 4.8GB, and System has written 103MB, and those are my top I/0 Write Bytes processes, neither of which is actually filling up the disk. I/O can also include things like network communication, which doesn't show up as used disk space. I think your System process is a red herring... what other processes are running, and are they accessing the disk?

 

I have EXACTLY the same problem! How did you solve it? Please let me know

 

First, you make sure it's a problem. From what vaca232 said, I'm not so sure.

First, regardless of what Task Manager says has been "written" by a process, that doesn't tell you what has been written, to where, and whether it has been deleted again.

Second, the number shown in Task Manager is *not* equal to the difference between your two "disk space used" numbers. Do you actually know that the system process writes to the C: drive? Or that it is the cause of your vanishing disk space?

Apart from this, has your free space ever actually reached 0 because of this? What happened then? Or do you just mean that it's slowly going down?

There could be a dozen explanations. For one thing, NTFS is a pretty complex file system, and it does a lot of things behind the scenes. Among other things, it logs all actions taken, so that they can be rolled back or repeated in the case of a system crash. It's perfectly possible that it deletes those logs upon succesful startup which temporarily frees up some space.

If you look at free disk space numbers from two different sources, they won't match, because they're counted differently. That almost never fails.

In particular, the second pic shows how much disk space is used.
The first one merely shows how much disk space actual files consume. That doesn't take into account all the NTFS metadata (logs are one example, but there are many more)

So from what you've said, I wouldn't worry.

 

What about Virtual Memory? Did you try lowering that or shutting it off?

I take it since your HD is small, Your RAM might be too ...and windows is using alot of VM