Comments on: <Unknown> again …

By: zoey

zoey — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:27:25 +0000

Hello there, I was having similar issues with my lenovo x61. Just deleted the backups in the think vantage rescue and recovery software and was able to reclaim a whopping 62 GB!

Thanks guys, this was a life saver

By: Flavio

Flavio — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:44:13 +0000

Very good tool, easy and simple! I have a WIN 2008 server and it helped me in finding “areas for improvement” (like deleting the 4gb hibernate file which is useless on a server).
Now I am struggling with the “unknown” files (over 20 GB out of 67 GB). Any clues of what they could be on a Win Server? Win Server offers no “System Restore Functions” and I already limited the space of Shadow Copies to 3 GB (enough for keeping 2 copies on my disk). I run chkdsk and everything is fine… no need for defrag either…
Thank you for any suggestion you may have!

By: Srikanth

Srikanth — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 14:07:14 +0000

Olivier,
I wanted to leave a word of thanks for the superb utility that you have provided.
Permitted me to get rid of some hidden junk in my PC that occupied 30 percent of valuable space.

Hats off!
Srikanth

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:24:04 +0000

Thanks for having this site and info. I had this same problem with 74GB of unknown. I have an IBM ThinkCentre workstation and windows disk management was reporting 145GB hard drive with only 5GB space left. WDS reported different. I had to go into system recovery and delete backups from the advanced drop-down. Solved the problem and now have 79GB of free space. Thanks a ton!!!

By: Jegatheesh

Jegatheesh — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:19:46 +0000

Dear Oliver,
I am having win7 ultimate. For the last two days my HDD free space is nearing to zero. I free up some space by deleting some movie files, and within hour those free spaces were filled. Had no clue, thought of Viruses and Trojans tried everything I could do.Did chkdsk /f several times. No luck. After googling I installed your WDS. Still with no luck. At least this time, after some more googling, it shows the unknown space. This blog helped me find who was the real culprit. It was my AV program Dr. Web which created a hidden directory DrWebQurantine where it stored thousands of files. Just a suggestion, is there a way you can embed the cmdassys inside your windirstat itself. And an advanced user can enable it under the options menu.
BTW, You saved the pain of reinstalling the OS + All the software. Thanks you very much
-Jegatheesh

By: Biggy

Biggy — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:00:56 +0000

Hi Oliver,

I’m not sure if you’ll be interested but I’ve solved my problem . . .

I had to leave windirstat running for approx 9 hours (seriously!) and I discovered that Windows Media Player had decided to continually cache millions of .jpg’s for my very (VERY!) large music collection inside its local folder on the Windows system

I’ve turned the WMP library and cache function off (I never use it for music) and added the folder to ‘CCleaners’ list of user added locations to clean out

I’ve just run CCleaner and I’m slowly watching over 50 gig’s of useless images, duplicated hundreds of times, being slowly banished. I have a slowly expanding hard drive!

Apparantly there’s some glitch in WMP on Windows 7 64 bit machines whereby the program just continually creates album art non stop the whole time the machine is on. No solution for it at this time

Thanks for your hard work, you certainly helped me to fix my PC

Biggy

By: Biggy

Biggy — Mon, 31 May 2010 16:30:17 +0000

Sorry . . . forgot to ask!

As I can’t get windirstat to run a full drive check as ‘admin’, can I just run as a normal user then simply delete all the unknown files?

I’ve tried many things with this problem and nothing seems to work

Thanks

Biggy

By: Biggy

Biggy — Mon, 31 May 2010 14:48:20 +0000

Hello all,

Been reading the above with interest as I have a very similar problem

I run a 64 bit HP system but it has a clean install of Windows 7 with none of the HP rubbish on it!

My C: drive is 100gb and at the moment it’s showing 100% full except for about 5gb

A check with windirstat showed a huge amount of ‘unknown’ files (about 60gb) which adds up because my windows folder and programs account for the rest

My problem is: running windirstat in any way at all as an Aministrator leaves the program ‘hanging’ after a while

If I just start it as ‘administrator’ it goes to about 16% then seems to stick and goes ‘not responding’

I’ve used the zip file above Oliver (CMDasSys.exe) and it gets to 20% but still hangs

In both cases I’ve left it an hour or so to see if it was just taking a while!

Any thoughts or suggestions would be gratefully received

Thanks

Biggy

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 21 May 2010 01:03:23 +0000

I should add, that if you don’t trust that program, better don’t trust WinDirStat either

Seriously: If you don’t trust it, don’t use it. It’s okay not to use it. I checked it just under a Disassembler to be sure and the file is legit and unchanged since I released it in 2003.

By: Oliver

Oliver — Fri, 21 May 2010 00:55:29 +0000

a.) Trojans don’t infect software, they do malicious things under false pretense.
b.) I wrote the programs, all three of them, and they should not contain anything malicious, unless my server got hacked.
c.) there are no indicators that my server got hacked.
d.) I ran the files through VirusTotal, a web-based multi-scanner, and cmdassys.exe yielded a “suspicion” from Comodo *only*.
e.) I am an antivirus developer and researcher myself and as such trust my own judgment as well as that of our command line scanner that got today released in the new 4.6.0 version.
f.) runassys.exe is a special version that would allow an unprivileged user to acquire system privileges, *if* the vulnerability exploited by it still existed. (unless you run NT4 or a Windows 2000 without updates, you will be safe.)
g.) look into the source code, it comes inside the archive and the detections are all false positives (see VirusTotal results for that file). However, you don’t need that program (cmdassys.exe will be sufficient) don’t use it. Aside from that, it is likelier that some script kiddies took the readily available source code from me and integrated it into their malware. Not my fault. I stand by FLOSS.

Common sense helps when an AV falsely reports something as malicious. But if I didn’t know that I wrote it, I might have judged it the same way as you if it would have come from another person. Although the results are not unanimous (our scanner does not falsely detect it ;)), one would be on the safe side assuming the worst instead of taking the risk.

In the end it depends whether you trust me or not. Being employed by an AV vendor I couldn’t and wouldn’t afford to write malware.

// Oliver