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Desciption

Windows 10 user here. As the title says, somehow overnight my C drive has been populated with 20GB of data overnight. The situation happened recently, and is something new, as it has not happened in the past.

My C Drive has normally around 25GB of free space left, but after going to sleep this space shrank to around 3GB (in fact the system broke down when I woke it up in the morning).

"broke down" means not returning back to Windows Desktop as usual but to become bluescreen anouncing "Your device has met problem, need reboot"(translated into English), and the terminal code was MEMORY_MANAGEMENT

Is this caused by some kind of virus or perhaps some user settings?

Before:

Normal capacity

Bluescreen during waking up:

Bluescreen

After:

Capacity after sleep

What's interesting is that if I shutdown and reboot, the free space will return to normal once more.

My Effort (or the Details)

I've tried to detect what happened using SpaceSniffer but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Before: SpaceSniffer: normal

After: SpaceSniffer: abnormal

I've also checked Windows EventViewer, and I remembered that there was no event during the sleep.

new observation：

  • I let my pc sleep(click Power->Sleep in) for just a while(around 10 minutes) before waking it up(by pressing keyboard), the situation remained the same(this time the space left around 5GB).
  • Directly reboot won't let the free space come back, only shutdown + boot would do.

Maybe it's some system error? (Oh I should check BSOD Error)

Thank you all very much for help!!! I would try those methods and report them if I'm free (tons of exams and deadlines are coming (´;ω;`)

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  • nothing weird, except maybe that warning?
    – Jaromanda X
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 2:20
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    Did an update complete overnight? If so, there might be a new folder, Windows.old, and the WinSxS folder may also have grown. Do not try to delete those folders or their contents manually. Instead, perform disk cleanup.
    – DrMoishe Pippik
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 5:14
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    I'm pretty sure it's not. As I wrote, I think your next step should be to use a better program to check folder sizes, run it also as admin to additionally avoid some potential permission problems, then there won't be any speculation.
    – Destroy666
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 13:30
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    A simple tool might be windirstat which will show you disk usage by folder and let you click through to see the usage by subfolder.
    – Blindspots
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 14:16
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    @Elucidator-xrb - Try and disable hibernation. Windows 10 and Windows 11 by default supports hybrid sleep. I would also NOT try to put your machine to sleep, since 25GB in my opinion, is not enough space to dump everything in memory to disk. Based on the memory management error, I suspect you have a memory issue, and the storage space while a concern is likely not related to system crashing while booting. Without a precise English translation of WinDBG analysis output of the .dmp I can't help resolve your issue.
    – Ramhound
    Commented Jun 2, 2023 at 14:21

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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Oh, I think the reason is indeed hibernation file.

I found its real size up to 31GB (which well fits my physical memory size). So I delete it with command powercfg -h off.(though I'm sure I've already shut off windows hibernation in gui... that's weird)

Spacesniffer only detect 12GB of herbernation file hiberfile.sys... It appears that this software indeed has a defect.

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