spontaneous duplicate files in same directory

Question

One of our users has a new Dell Latitude and noticed that her hard drive was suddenly about to run out of room. She found that most of the files have been triplicated. Thousands of files are now on the hard drive three times. Each instance shows triplicated files are in the same directory. I know of no way that files with the same file name and time stamp could exist in the same directory. When she deletes one of the files they all disappear. They are NOT shortcuts. Her 40GB hard drive that had over 30GB of room when new a couple of months ago now has less than 1GB of room. This sounds like a corrupted Master File Table but I want to know if anyone has heard of this before and what is the best fix. For now I have her backing up the hard drive to an external hard drive before we try anything. A call to Dell resulted in a them suggesting a couple of things then telling her to call Norton. She installed Norton Anti Virus immediately when she received the computer and has kept it updated. Any suggestions? Thanks,

redwolfe_98 · Answer

running 'system restore' can cause duplicate files to appear, but they will not have the exact same file name.. one will have something like '(2)' added to it.. however, i don't think it would be noticable as far as disk space is concerned..   one thing that is known to eat up disk space is using 'hibernation'.. you can turn 'hibernation' on and off in the power settings, in control panel.. Message Edited by redwolfe_98 on 08-05-2005 12:25 PM

Dharts · Answer

I don't think that hibernation is the issue. There are three files with exactly the same name in the same directory. That should be impossible. Deleting one of them deletes them all. Thanks for trying.

Windows General

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