Severe: Bug when cleaning free space

[achille]

I rarely use my windows installation. I had installed Eraser and had it set to clean the empty space every night at a certan time.

My computer soon came to a grinding halt, everything was very slow. Storage was almost to the max.

I quickly found out that i had over 250 000 (250 thousand) files in my home folder. They all carried the same datestamp, size andthey had incremental 8.3 filenames.

All the files were in C:\ , all hidden. Most tools would fail to operate on the files.

It was almost impossible deleting all the files, thankfully I had GNU coreutils added and I used find & xargs & rm. Everything back to normal now but other users will not be as lucky.

TIPS:
* When cleaning the drives... add some kind of check to make sure the temp files created are then erased,
* Please do not write them on C:\ as it's almost impossible to selectively erase them, use c:\temp ... or %TEMP something similar


Sample of the files:
C:\>dir /ah | more
Volume in drive C is C
Volume Serial Number is B4FE-5729

Directory of C:\

01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 0001066D.VE2
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 00048142.VDP
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 0004FD57.IPJ
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 0005F533.GIN
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 0007F0EF.SEA
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000A895F.JYO
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000FD1CF.MZ2
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000G092D.334
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000G4C36.KSJ
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000H3CCA.ZM8
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000HA74F.S1X
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000I4333.1DI
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000N833E.0H5
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000OA435.KVJ
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000P17A8.GBV
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000Q91F2.IE8
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000S4160.TAF
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000W873C.2SV
01/01/1980 12:00 AM 720 000X6344.7IO
... etc

 

[Carver]

Which version. If it was 5.8 beta, when did you download it, they refreshed the 4-10 beta about april 25 after my post in the beta sticky on april 22 about free space. Since you had so many entries nearly identical, is it possable you had a trojan or a worm. I am glad you got your computer back in working order.

 

[achille]

I am very sure this was not caused by any viruses for three reasons:
a) I run an antivirus (McAaffe ) 24/7 and rarely get to shut it down
b) I use the computer in 'user mode', and only login as administrator when I need to reinstall something or need to perform admin functions
c) I had to manually shut down eraser,which had frozen from working overnight

I had underestimated the number of files present. I was never able to see them all. They all had random data in them, very small filesize. The complete number is about 0.36 million files in C:\

The last bach I deleted were just the ones that contained the filename xxxxxxxx.8xxx xxxxxxxx.9xxx xxxxxxxx.0xxx and that was 30 thousand files It took about 45 minutes to delete that last bach.

Edit: This is version 5.7 stable