How-To Geek

I have a Vista HomePremium box here that has been exhibiting very strange behavior. All of it's free hard drive space has been disappearing. It has a 200 GB drive that was only 1/4 full, and starting a month or so ago it began filling up rapidly.

Recently I went to install something and found that the hard drive was completely full. I deleted about a gig of data, and found that that space was GONE in only a few minutes.

When I fired up WinDirStat, I found that the report queue in Windows/WER was taking up 171 GB!!! 99% of those files were created since the middle of last month.

I'm looking for an explanation of why this is happening and how to stop it. I can copy some of the log file info here if necessary, but the fact that they are being created so quickly and taking up so much space is just outrageous. Although I am fluent in XP, Vista is kinda new to me. Has anyone seen this before? Any ideas?

I don't think this is a shadow copy problem. There is a limit to how much space a shadow copy can take which certainly shouldn't be more then 50% of the drive.
Not to mention it would be unrelated to the WER report queue which seems to be taking most of the space.
I'm not sure what would case reports to take that much space.
My only guess would be the error reports are storing a copy of RAM at the time the error happened and with 1GB or 2GB or RAM that could add up quite a bit with many error reports. No idea how that many error reports could be made in such short time though.

Mika, Since you posted your "shadow storage" story here too, I repeat my answer from the other thread:
I think you are confusing things. "Restore points" and "Shadow Copies" in Vista is the same thing. When Vista creates a restore point, it writes a shadow into shadowstorage. These are typically 1GB per shadow and are written once a day and whenever a program or update is being downloaded. The size of the shadowstorage is 15% of your OS disk - and it is limited to that. When the shadowstorage is full, Vista starts overwriting old shadows starting with the earliest. Vista also never writes "full disk images" a la Norton Ghost. It writes deltas of the changes in the system - and as said above, those are typically +/- 1GB. Cleaning up the shadowstorage cannot cure the posters problem. There must be something else wrong

No problem. We all get ourselves misguided at times. But that's what we are together for: Learning by doing.

Um...CybrGuy. Do you have SP1?

Did you try to stop the error reporting?

1. Type PROBLEM into the Start search and open "Problem Reports and Solutions".
2. In the left pane, click Change settings.
3. Click Advanced Settings and set problem reporting "off" - or:
4. In the Block list, under "Don't send information about the following programs", click Add, and then find and select the programs for which you want to stop reporting problems.
5. Click OK.

Well, after shutting down the error reporting, I just went back and checked and the queued WER is up to 4.57 GB already. Dunno why, but even the symptom doesn't seem to be handled...

OK, well I made a significant mistake up thread. Lighthouse asked if I had SP1 on this computer and I looked in update history and saw SP1 and said yes. On closer inspection it appears that I saw Office SP1 listed and mistook it for Vista. Sorry.

So here is the deal. I am unable to install SP1 as it fails with the same (8007370D) error I get when trying to do a regular Windows update. This is a scratch built box and it does have SigmaTel sound, but it does have drivers from April 2008 so that shouldn't be stopping the updates.

And there are no restore points (before yesterday) on the system as SR was turned off when the drive filled up with the error reports.

My first problem now is getting WU to work and getting SP1 installed over this 8007370D error. Your help is appreciated.

Disabling the audio drivers has no effect. Same error message.

Yup. No joy. :(