PDA

View Full Version : 20GB WinXP system suddenly showing 100mb capacity!


cheardu2
Jun 12, 2007, 08:19 AM
We had a security breach of our small network over the weekend. Since that happened when two of the users came in on Monday and tried to log in. They got an error that said Windows cannot load your user profile and a temp profile will be used instead. When I (the I.T consultant) got there and investigated the system, I found that "my computer" was only showing the 20gb hard drive as having 100mb total capacity with 0%free. I tried to delete files from the hard drive and even emptied the recycle bin and still the computer showed 100mb total with 0% free. I went to manage computer and it shows 20gb total with 9.76 free. But its like my computer doesn't know that. I ran chkdsk /f/c/x. It said files were in use & if I wanted it to run when windows restarts. I said yes. It ran and when XP came back up, my computer showed that it still had 100mb total with 74mb free.

Any suggestions would help. Also ran stinger. Could not load McAfee because of lack of space.

-Chan

McNuggy@LMC
Jun 21, 2007, 03:50 PM
If you go into your recent activity log in admin settings it will tell you what has happened over the last week. You will need to open it via a text editor either notepad or wordpad. On my version of XP it is called events manager.

Did you scan all hidden and system files? Sometimes files are marked hidden therefore are not seen by the normal interface. You may find that whoever breached your security protocol may have installed something as a surprise and marked it hidden. The fact that your AV program won`t boot due to lack of virtual memory is usually a clue to these things. Its not that you don`t have it, just something is fooling the AV program and the win32.dll file.

Or you can go into your device manager and see if there is a hardware conflict.

You didn't mention if the hdd master is partitioned? If it is then sometimes if a program is installed on one partition and files from it are saved on another partition on the same hdd windows finds something to be picky about and makes life difficult.

If this doesn't work have a look in your temp folder in system32 and delete all files in there.

If that doesn't work do a direct dump from your master hdd to an external mass storage device then format the hdd from the ground up. This is a last resort mind you.

Hope that helped, my aunt had the same problem and when I checked her log someone had been using her as a host/proxy to d/l illegal software, and then had left a txt file string that kept on filling up the file with thank you very much thank you very much et al infinite, until it was a 25gb text string. Mofos the lot of them!

Good luck mate.