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Nov 8, 2018
902
Dublin, Ireland
I was testing the limits of that method I described in another thread of creating really good gifs. I inputted a really long video (over a minute), and the process crashed. Thought it might but the command prompt wasn't snapping back to its usual starting position (ya know, just the folder name>blinking cursor) so I just closed it. Didn't think that'd do any harm. Well I just checked my hard drive and I only have a few hundred megabytes where just before I had gigabytes. I tried looking for the file I'd unsuccessfully tried to create so I could delete it but it's nowhere on my system. I searched with Everything and I tried View Hidden Files but I still couldn't find it. What do I do? I need my drive space back. The computer's acting OK. Doesn't seem to be any damage. It's at a reasonable temperature and running normally but I need to get rid of this massive phantom file.
 

xillyriax

Game Test Analyst
Verified
Oct 27, 2017
773
California, USA
dl and give WinDirStat a try. it'll give you a visual representation of what's on your HDD. The larger the box, the larger the file
 

skipgo

Member
Dec 28, 2018
2,568
Invisible gif
Never see what he did
Got stuck where he hid
Fallen through the grid
 

Fat4all

Woke up, got a money tag, swears a lot
Member
Oct 25, 2017
92,683
here
talking-sex-to-your-children-1.gif
 
OP
OP
Jean-Luc Picard
Nov 8, 2018
902
Dublin, Ireland
Just to be sure, did you search for it using *.gif or whatever its extension is?
Yep. No luck.

Did you try a reboot?
I'm kind of afraid to at the moment in case the damn thing doesn't come back on. I've a lotta files I have to back up.

Or maybe run disk cleanup and see if it's in a temp folder?
I was just Googling Disk Cleanup because I'm not sure how to run it on my system. I'm a bit afraid of it deleting files I don't want it to. Could that happen?

dl and give WinDirStat a try. it'll give you a visual representation of what's on your HDD. The larger the box, the larger the file
Great, thanks. I'll try that.

Reboot and check your swap file.
What's a swap file?

Probably somewhere in the appdata folder under users.
I already said I've already tried that. Read the op before replying.
 
OP
OP
Jean-Luc Picard
Nov 8, 2018
902
Dublin, Ireland
Can't Everything sort by file size? Maybe some temp file got saved under a different name or file type.
Thought of that just a second ago. The biggest files I have on my system, that I don't know anything about, are hiberfil.sys (located just on the C drive, no folder, 3 GB), magick-6216bEJnmIAqf7oV (in AppData\Local\Temp, 2 GB, presumably something to do with ImageMagick, I guess; could be connected to this as the gif creating method does involve an executable that's associated with ImageMagick), and pagefile.sys (again located just on the C dfive, 2 GB).
 

skullmuffins

Member
Oct 25, 2017
7,419
magick-6216bEJnmIAqf7oV (in AppData\Local\Temp, 2 GB, presumably something to do with ImageMagick, I guess; could be connected to this as the gif creating method does involve an executable that's associated with ImageMagick),
this is a good candidate. it's just a temp file so no worries about breaking things if you delete it. how much space did you have before this mishap, anyway?
 

Wraith

Member
Jun 28, 2018
8,892
Is the process that generated the file still running when you look at Task Manager/All Processes?

Maybe also try Resource Monitor > Disk to see if it's still trying to write to disk.
 

cwmartin

Member
Oct 27, 2017
1,765
the size of your .sys files is not static, so having "5GB" left at any point doesn't really help you with isolating what happened. As someone mentioned before, if its temp, your okay to delete, reboot and see whats going on.
 
OP
OP
Jean-Luc Picard
Nov 8, 2018
902
Dublin, Ireland
The program was likely taking up that space as it processed the video. The interruption meant it didn't clean up after itself. The lack of space may have caused the crash in the first place.
Thanks.

It could be some error happened and the proces just kept writing to a file until it ran out of space.
Probably.

Is the process that generated the file still running when you look at Task Manager/All Processes?
Can't find anything that looks like it there.

Maybe also try Resource Monitor > Disk to see if it's still trying to write to disk.
The one thing writing to disk the most at the moment is System.

the size of your .sys files is not static, so having "5GB" left at any point doesn't really help you with isolating what happened. As someone mentioned before, if its temp, your okay to delete, reboot and see whats going on.
Thanks.
 
OP
OP
Jean-Luc Picard
Nov 8, 2018
902
Dublin, Ireland
Well I rebooted and the system came back on normally. Rebooting somehow managed to clear over half a GB on its own but when I ran Disk Cleanup again, it still told me I could only clear a few hundred MB. I selected Temporary files and clicked Clean up system files but it started running another scan for some reason. This scan's taking a lot longer than the last two. I managed to clear up about 2 and a half GB deleting that magick file from the temp folder, then deleted system restore points and that got me back another GB. So I'm back now at around 5 GB. Disk Cleanup just finished its second scan and told me I have a 2 GB folder of old versions of Windows Updates that are no longer needed. So I'm gonna get rid of that and the Temporary files again and then I'm gonna run CCleaner lastly. Hopefully nothing like this'll happen again.