help! HD missing 20 gb (and progressively more)

2 days ago, I installed the Vista updates, then went to sleep; yesterday, I tried using photoshop CS1, but it said that the scratch disk was full when there was over 22 GB free on my C drive, and the scratch disk meter in PS said there was at least 700mb left on the scratch disk. I looked online and it said to defrag to fix the problem.

So I defragged overnight and checked this morning. For some reason, that 22 GB free became 1.2 GB free. I system restored to before the update, and it went up to 4GB free, but then that steadily decreased, and now I'm back at 3.0 GB.

I'm currently scanning my comp, but nothing has come up so far. I've never reinstalled an OS before and I don't want to have to set up everything since I have to go back to school in a few days, so I really don't know what to do. Any help is appreciated.

 

Have a look at this guide on the site
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=167983

Copy pasted from the above link

Volume Shadow Copy: This is biggest reason for "missing" space in Vista! Instead of explaining it myself, I'll quote wikipedia:
This service can be very useful, and is a good idea to keep it enabled. However, it does eat disk space. A LOT of disk space. By default it allocates %15 of the disk to store it's data. On a 160GB disk, that's 24GB! A lot of people have been noticing that after a few weeks of using their new system, free space seems to shrink daily. This is because the space is not allocated right away, only when it's needed. It will stop when it reaches %15. At that point, it will delete older versions to make room for newer ones. For all the details about Shadow Copy, read this article at ZDNet for a really good explanation.

 

http://www.wikihow.com/Reduce-Shadow-Copy-on-Windows-Vista

This article shows you how to limit the size of the shadow copy.

 

the issue with that is that there is only 14 gb used for shadow storage, whereas I lost over 20 gb overnight, so Im sure that that isnt the problem here.

In fact, my 4 gb has now gone down to only 900 mb of storage on my entire HD.

 

Ok I finally found the adobe PS temp file - it was over 26 gb in size! I think this is the culprit, though I'm still not sure why my comp kept losing HD space even when I stopped using PS,

Thanks for your help, hopefully the case is closed...

 

And we all thought it was MS Windows making problems again. Adobe became even worse.

I am happy that you have found the solution, and this just reminded me that the CS3 installation on Vista was the worst instalation that I ever tried to do on my laptop. Horror. Uninstallation was equally bad too. Actually Adobe managed to be on par with norton uninstallation nightmare (that may be fixed now - I will never know actually since norton has been dead for me for good). It was so slow that I went out having a (big) cup of coffee while it installed 5 (five) programs along with my choice (dreamweaver) and I wanted and selected only 1 (dreamweaver). It finally started to crash (I think it is now fixed with a Vista hotfix) and I said goodbye to it. Now to remove these 5 lasts equally long. Cleaning scripts after uninstall? forget it. I manually cleaned registry and all garbage it left in my maps. I tried it once more and tried installing other programs. After the even longer (we are talking a hour here on 2GB C2D machine!) install Fireworks was useless with Aero, Flash too. They have fixed it by now probably, but I don't like Adobe anymore. Not even their Reader.

Ivan

 

my apologies to MS...