Weirdest harddrive findings ive yet found.

Otto_iii · October 1, 2019

So ive been getting slightly into computers, just enough i can setup and install basic hardware and windows, and ofc this is like the most basic boring thing and warrants absolutely no bragging points here, but it amazes my old family and their friends 'cause reasons.'

Anyways my father had been given a PC by his friend to use assuming we (me or my father) could fix it, I'm on it now infact after clean install on new SSD and a blow with a airgun, ezpz. What shocked me about it is WHY it was broken, or atleast running pretty awful. It did have a plethora of dust that honestly i should of taken pics of, looked like it had been snowed in, but what was really wrong is its hard drive was full. This alone obviously isn't amazing any older businessman could fill his hard-drive with aggressively automated windows backups, but that didn't seem to be what it was, although maybe possibly related. For reference this was on Window 7 Office Edition, and I'm only mentioning incase somebody knows how this happened.

What i found was 4 folders named
"Z"
"ZZ"
"ZZZ" and finally
"ZZZZ" all on the main C:/ drive

In them i found word documents with a image of what appeared to be the desktop on startup, basically the most bare picture of the desktop possible with no programs running etc, in each document this photo seemed to be copied 100 times, and given there was about 200gb of these word documents named "copy copy copy copy..." and they were about 1 megabyte each i have no clue how this could of occurred, even if it happened dozens of times each time he started up the amount of these files was staggering. Literally just kept happening till the hard drive literally had no space left.

Personally i thought it was hilarious, and I'm trying to figure out how a man in his 60s created such a original problem for himself, but until then its a mystery to me.

Spotty · October 1, 2019

1 minute ago, Otto_iii said:

What i found was 4 folders named
"Z"
"ZZ"
"ZZZ" and finally
"ZZZZ" all on the main C:/ drive

In them i found word documents with a image of what appeared to be the desktop on startup, basically the most bare picture of the desktop possible with no programs running etc, in each document this photo seemed to be copied 100 times, and given there was about 200gb of these word documents named "copy copy copy copy..." and they were about 1 megabyte each i have no clue how this could of occurred, even if it happened dozens of times each time he started up the amount of these files was staggering. Literally just kept happening till the hard drive literally had no, and i mean NO room on it.

I've seen this before.

Some software designed to wipe HDDs will do this where they fill the drive with such files to overwrite the deleted data. With a HDD when you delete a file you don't actually delete it, the HDD just changes it to say that it's okay to overwrite the data that is on that spot on the HDD. This means that it's quite easy to recover deleted files from a HDD. What the data erasing software does is fill the drive with junk files like what you've described, overwriting those deleted files from the HDD with new junk data. The software is supposed to clean up after itself and 'delete' those junk files after it is complete.

It's possible that there's a virus that is doing the same thing just to ruin peoples HDDs and use up all their free space. If you think they're not tech savvy then it's probably the virus. Run a full virus scan.