My PC started running really slow. So I checked a few things to see what the problem was. Much to my shock I saw that my 1 terabyte HD was almost full. It was way over into the red on the properties screen. There was only a few mbytes to spare. I only had Win 7, about 800 music files, maybe around 5-7 gbytes of videos, 3 large games - New Vegas, Hitman and Portal, a few utility programs - nothing anywhere near what I was seeing in the properties. A rough estimate of my used space would have been around 50 gigs. That estimate is probably way higher then what was actually there. I went through my directories one at a time and didn't see anything out of the ordinary. I was baffled. I really wasn't sure how to look at the whole drive to see for certain where all the space was going, short of keeping track of each directory's size on a calculator. That seemed so tedious that I put it off for a few days. Then one day my PC wouldn't boot up. Instead it took me to the chkdsk screen, saying my HD has some errors and it recommended running chkdsk. So I did. It got about halfway through and hung. I tried it again. Same thing. I tried booting it up in safe mode. When it got to the screen that listed all the drivers it was loading, it would hang and reboot. I was beside myself because, I'm embarrassed to say, I hadn't backed up my data. I was almost to the point of bringing my problem to this forum, but I thought I would try to run the repair disk I had made when the PC was brand new. That failed. So I tried the recovery disks. When it asked if I wanted to keep my data files and just reload the system files I said YES!!! So it proceeded to run a backup. After it was done with that it started to reload the system files. It asked for all 3 disks. Everything was going smoothly until it went to restart the PC. As it was booting up I saw a couple of messages that looked like it was working (things like updating registry, installing devices). Then across the bottom of the screen it said, "Setup is applying system settings" and an error message box appeared that said Windows could not complete the installation. The PC rebooted and went back to the "Press any key to boot from CD" screen. I repeated the same process about 3 or 4 times. Nothing changed.
Remember that before the HD went down I had looked at it in the properties screen and saw that I only had a few mbytes of space left. Something ate up all that space. That was Problem # 1.
I don't know if the recovery installation failed because there wasn't enough room on the drive to perform the backup. But if that were so, why didn't the backup program warn me that there wasn't enough room? Maybe its not supposed to.
So I took the HD out of another PC I had laying around, an 80 gigabyte, and put it in this PC as the C drive and loaded Windows 7 onto it with the recovery disks, no problem. I put my sic hard drive in as well as a second drive hoping I might be able to salvage my precious data off of it. I am happy to report that it was (is) all there safe and sound. So I decided to go through the drive and delete everything, folder by folder, until I came to the thing that had eaten all my space. I cleared out a lot of stuff and had freed up about 155 gigs. Then I noticed a folder on what had been the root directory called 'found.000'. It wouldn't let me open it, saying I didn't have permission, so I changed the permissions and was able to open it. Inside was another folder called 'dir0000.chk'. I opened that folder and OMG!!!! It was filled with .sst files. Each one was 186kb. I let Explorer run for an hour and a half and it still wasn't finished opening the folder. I finally shut it down. The properties of that folder said that it had 3,743,905 files in it that added up to 671 gigabytes. The dates the files were created spanned from July 21st to July 27th. There were large groups of them, each group separated from the next by 4 minutes. The filenames started at 002000 and ran sequentially until 999999. From my calculations, what I saw listed was less then 30% of the files. That means that whatever created all those files ran nonstop for 24 days straight, until it ran out of space on Aug 14th. Which is the day my computer wouldn't boot up and took me, instead, to the chkdsk screen.
WOW!!!
So I have a few questions:
1. What is a .sst file? I googled it and I found about 10 different explanations for it. They can't all be right.
2. What did this to my PC? Was it a virus of some sort?
3. Could I have two problems at the same time? The first one being whatever it was that ate up my space; the second one being that maybe there is something physically wrong with my HD, perhaps caused from the continuous use it was under during those 24 days? Could that be the reason the recovery disks didn't reinstall Windows correctly?
I sure hope somebody can shed some light on any or all of this.
To those who made it through that lengthy explanation, thank you.
Tech Support Guy System Info Utility version 1.0.0.2
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5
Processor Count: 4
RAM: 3959 Mb
Graphics Card: Intel(R) HD Graphics, 1755 Mb
Hard Drives: C: Total - 35000 MB, Free - 2809 MB; D: Total - 41307 MB, Free - 35590 MB; E: Total - 99 MB, Free - 61 MB; F: Total - 933767 MB, Free - 159333 MB;
Motherboard: Acer, Aspire X3950
Antivirus: McAfee Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, Updated and Enabled
The only difference between this sysinfo and what I had on the original HD was the size of the HD's (obviously) The original HD shows in the current sysinfo as drive letters E and F, with E being hidden. Also on the orig setup I was running AVG instead of McAfee.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.
Remember that before the HD went down I had looked at it in the properties screen and saw that I only had a few mbytes of space left. Something ate up all that space. That was Problem # 1.
I don't know if the recovery installation failed because there wasn't enough room on the drive to perform the backup. But if that were so, why didn't the backup program warn me that there wasn't enough room? Maybe its not supposed to.
So I took the HD out of another PC I had laying around, an 80 gigabyte, and put it in this PC as the C drive and loaded Windows 7 onto it with the recovery disks, no problem. I put my sic hard drive in as well as a second drive hoping I might be able to salvage my precious data off of it. I am happy to report that it was (is) all there safe and sound. So I decided to go through the drive and delete everything, folder by folder, until I came to the thing that had eaten all my space. I cleared out a lot of stuff and had freed up about 155 gigs. Then I noticed a folder on what had been the root directory called 'found.000'. It wouldn't let me open it, saying I didn't have permission, so I changed the permissions and was able to open it. Inside was another folder called 'dir0000.chk'. I opened that folder and OMG!!!! It was filled with .sst files. Each one was 186kb. I let Explorer run for an hour and a half and it still wasn't finished opening the folder. I finally shut it down. The properties of that folder said that it had 3,743,905 files in it that added up to 671 gigabytes. The dates the files were created spanned from July 21st to July 27th. There were large groups of them, each group separated from the next by 4 minutes. The filenames started at 002000 and ran sequentially until 999999. From my calculations, what I saw listed was less then 30% of the files. That means that whatever created all those files ran nonstop for 24 days straight, until it ran out of space on Aug 14th. Which is the day my computer wouldn't boot up and took me, instead, to the chkdsk screen.
WOW!!!
So I have a few questions:
1. What is a .sst file? I googled it and I found about 10 different explanations for it. They can't all be right.
2. What did this to my PC? Was it a virus of some sort?
3. Could I have two problems at the same time? The first one being whatever it was that ate up my space; the second one being that maybe there is something physically wrong with my HD, perhaps caused from the continuous use it was under during those 24 days? Could that be the reason the recovery disks didn't reinstall Windows correctly?
I sure hope somebody can shed some light on any or all of this.
To those who made it through that lengthy explanation, thank you.
Tech Support Guy System Info Utility version 1.0.0.2
OS Version: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium, 64 bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3 CPU 540 @ 3.07GHz, Intel64 Family 6 Model 37 Stepping 5
Processor Count: 4
RAM: 3959 Mb
Graphics Card: Intel(R) HD Graphics, 1755 Mb
Hard Drives: C: Total - 35000 MB, Free - 2809 MB; D: Total - 41307 MB, Free - 35590 MB; E: Total - 99 MB, Free - 61 MB; F: Total - 933767 MB, Free - 159333 MB;
Motherboard: Acer, Aspire X3950
Antivirus: McAfee Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware, Updated and Enabled
The only difference between this sysinfo and what I had on the original HD was the size of the HD's (obviously) The original HD shows in the current sysinfo as drive letters E and F, with E being hidden. Also on the orig setup I was running AVG instead of McAfee.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.