Wednesday, March 14, 2007

2 Gigabytes of errors

I recently installed linux on an old (2001) machine. I left windows installed as a fallback.
Today I was cleaning out the windows partition (about 8 1/4 GB were used). I did the basics, uninstall old programs, delete temporary files (with Ccleaner), get rid of unwanted pictures and so forth. But when I finished, (I got the hard drive usage down to about 4.5 GB) I opened up WinDirStat and found that there were 2 GB of .CPY files. After a little pocking around, I discovered that they were all in a hidden folder (C:/_RESTORE/temp/). This folder is for system restore points. I had previously set the system restore points to only take up 200 MB. So then I googled: 'system restore cpy'. I found out that they are caused by an error in windows ME, the version of windows that was installed. I tried to delete them, but they were "protected". After a few failed attempts to get rid of them, I resorted to linux. I opened up the terminal window (effectively a command prompt for you windows users) and did: rm *.cpy. Guess what. There were so many files, linux would not delete them all at once. I had to section off the files in groups of about 1,000 (fortunately they were named with consecutive numbers) and finally wiped them all away. Now the windows partition only has about 2.6 GB used.

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