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Answer» Hi, I have a question about what XP might do in the event that the C: drive gets absolutely maxed out.
For a while now I've just been dumping crap onto my 80GB Seagate C: drive, and a few days ago I realized that there was less than 1GB of space left. I planned on reformatting this drive in the next week or so, so I didn't pay much attention.
Then last night it was, I kid you not, down to 38.5MB of free space. I was in the midst of downloading the new Ubuntu release (to a different drive, because I knew I didn't have the space for it on C:) when I went to bed. However, when I woke up this morning, I discovered that I had also been downloading two other files (which had been in progress for several days, hence my having forgotten about them), which WERE going to C:, and the C: drive suddenly had 1.04GB of free space.
What is XP's protocol when a hard drive reaches ABSOLUTE max capacity? I'm hoping that it hasn't deleted anything that I'm attached to, but I HONESTLY don't know where to start looking first.
thanks in advance for your time and any insight you can offer
RojerNormally you get a popup on the screen saying your drive is full. I have seen computers reboot when the drive is full.
in windows xp, delete the old system restore files if you got those, disk cleanup can do it for you. System restore point take up good space especially if you don't need all the old ones.XP will not randomly delete things just because the drive is getting close to being full...
That being SAID i'm frankly suprised the machine even runs at all...
Normal headroom of free space is around 15%.
On an 80G drive this would be approx. 12G.Have you got Volume Shadow Copies enabled? Occasionaly when the VSS service barfs it will release disk space.
As Pat is indicating, lots of things break as you approach capacity. Various services stop logging and die, internet browsing goes haywire, the temporary files needed by Word and Outlook can no longer be created, resulting in weird error messages, etc, etc.
Quote from: Rob Pomeroy on May 26, 2009, 02:44:00 PM Have you got Volume Shadow Copies enabled? Occasionaly when the VSS service barfs it will release disk space.
As Pat is indicating, lots of things break as you approach capacity. Various services stop logging and die, internet browsing goes haywire, the temporary files needed by Word and Outlook can no longer be created, resulting in weird error messages, etc, etc.
when you are no longer able to defragment your pc without the windows defragmenter complaining that your pc is almost out of space, you need to get something done about it. And windows won't just randomly delete files. A malware or virus can but not the OPERATING system unless you have told it to in something like a system TASK associated with a program.Computer with very low hard disk free space won't boot at all one day.
Quote from: Broni on May 26, 2009, 08:55:10 PMComputer with very low hard disk free space won't boot at all one day.
it's an old man with a almost broken back. save him.Thanks for the input everyone, it's working better now.Good News...
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