Don't use Windows Disk Cleanup

[Ciber]

I want to share something I wrote on wordpress about how windows 7 disk cleanup killed my PC. It really shouldn't be possible but it is. https://jakekuyser.wordpress.com/201...-killed-my-pc/

[smargh]

I've run it many times on many PCs; never had any issues.

I saw startup repair kicking in recently on a colleague's PC. "My hard drive just died again", he said, after he rebooted for the first time after I replaced his PC the day before. The startup repair stuff appeared every time he started up and it couldn't fix it. He left a USB drive plugged in.

Correlation != causation, but such stories are of course a good place to put Amazon affiliate links.

[kalniel]

Would the OP care to share his story on these forums?

[Ciber]

I've run it many times on many PCs; never had any issues.

I saw startup repair kicking in recently on a colleague's PC. "My hard drive just died again", he said, after he rebooted for the first time after I replaced his PC the day before. The startup repair stuff appeared every time he started up and it couldn't fix it. He left a USB drive plugged in.

Correlation != causation, but such stories are of course a good place to put Amazon affiliate links.

In the days of Windows XP disk cleanup was a standard part of routine maintenance. I was sure it couldn't harm my system. Until it did. I'm sure that nothing else removed those system files. I eliminated all other suspects, leaving only one, however unlikely it might seem. Read this if you don't believe it from me:

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/se...-registration/

Would the OP care to share his story on these forums?

I can copy and paste but it won't end up as readable.

[Ciber]

CTRL-ALT-HELL: WINDOWS 7 DISK CLEANUP KILLED MY PC.

November 27, 2015
(A cautionary tale)

TLDR: Don’t use disk cleanup on Windows 7 and be sure to backup regularly.

I wanted my computer to load games a little bit faster. It was all working fine but I just wanted faster! I used windows explorer to see how full my system drive was and it was pretty full. I clicked ‘Disk Cleanup’ to make some room and I chose ‘Clean up system files’ to get extra space back. Then I ticked some options that it made sense to remove and ‘OK’ to free up many Gigabytes.

It ran for a while, supposedly removing temporary files that are no longer needed but after it finished there wasn’t much more space showing on the drive. If your PC isn’t working right the first thing to try is a re-boot, so that’s what I did, only to be told ‘Your computer was unable to start’.





This automated repair function was unable to fix my PC though. I rebooted again and again, every time getting the same screen. Each time I was getting more worried and confused. Why can’t it start? What went wrong? My computer was stuck in this loop and unusable, broken. It was only giving me this unfriendly, unhelpful screen that doesn’t repair anything and doesn’t tell me why. What is ‘Startup Repair’?

It’s the nightmare scenario. I can’t use my PC. I can’t get at my photos, my documents, my emails. It all seems to be gone. I’m in ‘Ctrl-Alt-Delete Hell’ and I don’t know how to fix it. I decided to try the ‘System Recovery Options’ screen I’m presented with next.





System restore! That should work but it says there are no system restore points. I’m sure I had system restore points but they seem to be gone. Did Disk Cleanup destroy all of those? It definitely shouldn’t do that!

OK, lets look at ‘System Image Recovery’. Did I do a back-up recently? The only system image is from five long years ago. That’s not going to be great. I wasn’t in a hurry to go back to 2010! Lesson learned: Back up your computer regularly. Both a system drive image and copies of all the files that matter to you, photos, emails, documents, videos etc..

Luckily these days I have my phone, my tablet, even another PC so I can look these problems up on the internet. I found this and tried all the things but none of them fixed it: https://neosmart.net/wiki/startup-repair-infinite-loop/ . I looked up several other websites explaining how to fix the startup repair problem. I learned lots about the Windows Bootstrap but there was probably nothing wrong with that.

I needed to find out why Windows was not booting, why this repair screen was being invoked, what was basically wrong with my PC. What was not working most visibly and not telling me why? I needed to disable ‘Startup Repair’ itself, stop it from running. I found a couple of forum threads on how to do that:

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-d...lt-option.html

“At the Command prompt enter the following:

bcdedit /set {default} recoveryenabled No

This will disable Startup Repair from automatically booting when there is a problem.”

So I restart again and I get a screen like the one below, telling me that Windows/system/winload.exe is missing or bad, error status 0xc0000428. When I looked into the drive, that file was not there, so I get a good copy of that file from one of my old system images and insert that in the correct place. (This isn’t easy to do). I reboot for the umpteenth time.



That seemed to have worked but there is now another file missing, Ntoskrnl.exe. I replace that and another file is gone. I go through this with several files, Hal.dll, Kdcom.dll, Pshed.dll, Clfs.sys, CI.dll, were all missing and more. I still haven’t fixed my PC.

It seems that disk clean-up has deleted lots of essential system files that should be protected as well as all system restore points and who knows what else. It’s killed windows. Here is a page I found about windows 7 disk cleanup breaking computers due to a registry problem.

http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/se...-registration/

The only way I can fix my PC now is to do a clean install or restore from a backup. I restored that 5 year old backup and I’m back up and running. I’ve lost lots of files and applications from my PC and I’ve wasted lots of time trying to fix something that can’t be fixed. The moral of this story is: Don’t use disk cleanup on Windows 7 and be sure to backup regularly.

You can use windows back-up to save a system drive image to an external hard drive.

Open Backup and Restore by clicking the Start button , clicking Control Panel, clicking System and Maintenance, and then clicking Backup and Restore.
Do one of the following: If you’ve never used Windows Backup before, click Set up backup, and then follow the steps in the wizard.
Backing up your files – Windows Help

You can buy a 1TB USB3 external hard drive for about £40. I want to get one of these:

Seagate Expansion 1TB USB 3.0 Portable 2.5 inch External Hard Drive for PC, Xbox One & Xbox 360

I’m also going to get around the backing up the files that matter to me to the cloud for safety. I’m not an expert on the cloud but you can get online storage at amazon, so that’s an easy place to start: Amazon prime with unilimted free photo storage

I hope you make some back-ups now and I hope you don’t use windows disk-cleanup from now on!

[satrow]

The winhelponline blog linked suggests that the cause might have been from running a Registry cleaner:

This may have been a result of running a registry cleaner.

[EndlessWaves]

The winhelponline blog linked suggests that the cause might have been from running a Registry cleaner:

Although if you follow the MDSN link it has been updated to state:

"If this value is absent on Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) and later, the cleanup handler is ignored and it returns S_FALSE on initialization.

If this value is absent on the original release of Windows Vista and earlier, the root folder of the current volume is used. The DDEVCF_DOSUBDIRS flag is needed in that case to search the entire drive. Without it, only the root folder itself is searched."

So it appears that default behaviour should have been modified so it shouldn't have happened on a Windows 7 install. It sounds like a similar issue though.

Saying 'don't use windows disk cleanup' is unhelpful though. Chances are there are similarly rare circumstances that'll cause any method of cleanup to trash your windows install. It'd be far more helpful to detail the combination of factors and circumstances that cause the problem so they can be avoided in future (and Microsoft can look at changing/fixing/mitigating them if they haven't already). Without a recent system image you don't have much chance of re-creating the problem, although it's worth a shot once you've brought your backups up to date.

Although it's always worth repeating the message about backups.

[Ciber]

The winhelponline blog linked suggests that the cause might have been from running a Registry cleaner:

Might have been. Disk cleanup does the cleaning away of the vital system files.

Well it says the deed is done by Disk cleanup but that altering the registry might cause disk cleanup to misbehave. It's several years since I used a registry cleaner. I don't think I've used one since windows XP.

Again, registry cleaning was an accepted part of the maintenance routine and safe to do if you used the right cleaner. Not any more.

Either way disk cleanup is not safe to use and you should back-up regularly.

[Corky34]

Either way disk cleanup is not safe to use and you should back-up regularly.

If that was truly the case wouldn't there be more than the 3 people that reported the problem to winhelponline.com?
I wouldn't say 3 people, 4 if we include yourself, is sufficient to say it's a problem.

[OilSheikh]

This is what I always do :

Install Windows + Software on C: = SSD
Documents , Installation files, etc. = HDD

I take an image of my C: with Macrium Reflect and store it in an external hard drive. If anything happens to my Windows, I simply restore the Macrium image and then re-assign Documents, Desktop, etc. location and I am back up and running

[Splash]

Again, registry cleaning was an accepted part of the maintenance routine and safe to do if you used the right cleaner. Not any more.

I have *never* seen a "registry cleaner" do anything other than cause issues. Broken links, missing DLLs etc etc. I would personally avoid them.

Either way disk cleanup is not safe to use

Conjecture, Your Honour. I have personal experience of a sample size greater than 1 who have used it on more or less every version of Windows over the years without experiencing the issue you describe. Were your issue easily replicated I would suggest that others would have seen the issue - without documenting your exact circumstances this could be anything that caused these (incidentally protected) system files to become corrupted or deleted. Blindly stating that it's not safe when it has been shown to be safe in regular use is misleading.

and you should back-up regularly.

This goes without saying, obviously.

[Ciber]

If that was truly the case wouldn't there be more than the 3 people that reported the problem to winhelponline.com?
I wouldn't say 3 people, 4 if we include yourself, is sufficient to say it's a problem.

A quick google search finds several pages about this problem. Each page has a few others posting about having a similar problem wind disk cleanup.



Using slightly diferent search terms will find more similar pages.

This is what I always do :

Install Windows + Software on C: = SSD
Documents , Installation files, etc. = HDD

I take an image of my C: with Macrium Reflect and store it in an external hard drive. If anything happens to my Windows, I simply restore the Macrium image and then re-assign Documents, Desktop, etc. location and I am back up and running

Good idea.

I have *never* seen a "registry cleaner" do anything other than cause issues. Broken links, missing DLLs etc etc. I would personally avoid them.

Conjecture, Your Honour. I have personal experience of a sample size greater than 1 who have used it on more or less every version of Windows over the years without experiencing the issue you describe. Were your issue easily replicated I would suggest that others would have seen the issue - without documenting your exact circumstances this could be anything that caused these (incidentally protected) system files to become corrupted or deleted. Blindly stating that it's not safe when it has been shown to be safe in regular use is misleading.

Well this goes with a big dose of YMMV. Rare though it may be, it happened to me and I want to warn people about this risk. To me the risk is not worth it. Save a few gig and risk all your files in the process is not worth it. Yes the system files are protected so if I tried to delete them I would find it difficult but evidently disk cleanup is a legacy app and has no such protections. It even deleted all system restore points with no warning. Therefore I don't recommend anyone uses it. Ever.

Did you actually read my article?


You may disagree. But. Please. If you must use windows disk cleanup, do make a full back-up to an external drive beforehand. Every time. I can't emphasise that enough.

[Corky34]

A quick google search finds several pages about this problem. Each page has a few others posting about having a similar problem wind disk cleanup.

Sorry but how is a screen shot of a Google search proof of anything? Half the results say it's caused by using a registry "cleaner" and the other half say it's not deleting something it should be.

Either way it's irrelevant as the problem you've experienced wasn't because of Windows disk cleanup, it was cause by a third party program altering the default configuration, maybe if you carried out some more test and identified what program altered the registry then you would be on to something.

make a full back-up to an external drive...

That's something everyone should do, computers aren't infallible, things break.

[kompukare]

Anyway, while a nice read I think the blog posts is not really doing anybody any favours.

Obviously the zeroth thing to do is to have a working backup...

And in this case, the first thing to do would have been to back up your data. And I feel that any blog covering subject should state this even if only from hindsight ('now that I know more what I am doing, I would have first backed up my files').

There are now plenty of ways of getting recovering files from a (non-encrypted) Windows NTFS file system:
1) Microsoft do now offer various Windows PE options like the repair options in Windows Installation Media, and there are commercial and freeware version of these you can download and use to boot from a USB drive or DVD.
2) Pretty much any live Linux can do that job, or a Linux specifically designed for this like GParted Live (sadly Parted Magic is now commercial).

PS: To me 'kill' implies that some hardware was broken which clearly wasn't the case.

[Ciber]

Sorry but how is a screen shot of a Google search proof of anything? Half the results say it's caused by using a registry "cleaner" and the other half say it's not deleting something it should be.

Either way it's irrelevant as the problem you've experienced wasn't because of Windows disk cleanup, it was cause by a third party program altering the default configuration, maybe if you carried out some more test and identified what program altered the registry then you would be on to something.

I've already spent many hours trying to make an unfixable system boot up, recovering files from the same un-bootable system, restoring a back-up and then installing all my drivers and apps etc etc etc... So, if you think I was going to do some kind of forensic research to find out what made 'disk cleanup' commit such a crime you must be joking, right?

Either take my advice or don't take my advice but I don't need to you tell me that I did something less than sensible with my PC.

a nice read

I'm glad you liked the writing. That's what my blog is about. I'm not setting my stall out as some kind of expert PC advisor.

Obviously the zeroth thing to do is to have a working backup...

Obviously. But I fell out of that habit. I'm falling back into that routine. When your PC has worked without issue for years you stop worrying about it. Plus my actual photos, music, and documents were stored in several places all along, which I chose not to mention for effect.

There are now plenty of ways of getting recovering files from a (non-encrypted) Windows NTFS file system:
1) Microsoft do now offer various Windows PE options like the repair options in Windows Installation Media, and there are commercial and freeware version of these you can download and use to boot from a USB drive or DVD.
2) Pretty much any live Linux can do that job, or a Linux specifically designed for this like GParted Live (sadly Parted Magic is now commercial).

That's about what I used to get any data I wasn't sure was backed up that recently. But I didn't want to write a technical piece.

PS: To me 'kill' implies that some hardware was broken which clearly wasn't the case.

Dramatic effect. 'Cleanup got me a bit annoyed' seems less interesting to read.

[Corky34]

I've already spent many hours trying to make an unfixable system boot up, recovering files from the same un-bootable system, restoring a back-up and then installing all my drivers and apps etc etc etc... So, if you think I was going to do some kind of forensic research to find out what made 'disk cleanup' commit such a crime you must be joking, right?

No I'm not joking, i would expect anyone making such a claim to backup that claim with some hard evidence, that's they way these things work, i could claim there's an armchair orbiting Neptune or how it's unsafe to use Windows 10 but without some form of evidence why should anyone listen, let alone believe what i say?

People have already explained that it was your use of a third-party program that altered the way the disk cleanup utility operated, if you can prove otherwise feel free to enlighten us.

Either take my advice or don't take my advice but I don't need to you tell me that I did something less than sensible with my PC.

Sorry but wasn't it you that started this thread and posted advise on a blog? If you don't like people questioning your advise then maybe making it public isn't the best course of action.