I ran Vista disk cleanup and checked a box saying some crazy GB to clean so I ran it and it formatted??? my hard drive. I could not start the PC and had to reinstal vista. I see on web a few have had similar problem. I have contacted Microsoft and they say they do know of this problem and will come back to me.

After the reinstall I ran the disk cleanup again and the option is still there, somthing like “user queud error report log file 45GB??? “obviously I did not perform the task.

Has anyone any info on this.

Hey Terry,

I’ve JUST ran into the exact same problem…luckily I had another laptop I could use until I can get back to work and reload my good laptop. I’m not sure what the files are and why they would show up in the disk cleanup area where one would think they should only see un-necessary files or bad files that should be deleted. I apparently will stay away from this method of cleaning up my hard drive on a vista machine. Let me know anything you hear about this….grrrr!!!

what a pain!!!

http://www.ccleaner.com

Works better, faster, and won’t hose your PC. (Careful with the Registry clean though)

Oh and it’s free :thumbup:

It has happened to me twice now. Luckily, I did a complete system backup before the cleanup. I saw the “goofy” GB amounts, larger than my whole disk to be gained. I traced the entry to “Downloaded Program Files” (?) for IE7, which contained a bunch of damaged objects that I haad a bugger of time deleteing. Any, as the cleanup ran, I watched icons on my desktop disappear one by one. The worst of it is that intelide.sys gets crapped and when you repair, half of the disk is gone. Usually the most recent items.
Had to restore and start over.

How has this not been fixed yet? This same thing just happened to me deleting all my university coursework, family pictures, game files, everything gone! I should’ve known something was funny about the 45 gigs I was supposed to be able to gain, but I just thought it was some time of numbering glitch and lo and behold, everything gone! I tried to use system restore but all I could get was a blank black screen with a cursor, so now I’m going to have to pay to have Vista reinstalled.

To be honest, at this point I don’t even want to use the stupid OS anymore…

hey i used this and its very useful it helped me alot.

Yep, Exact same thing happened to me! Surely this is a major oversight on the part of Microsoft, as anything trivial that can wipe your entire hard disk using Disk Clean up is unforgivable. What if this happened to a newbe, they could be forking out a fortune to technical support to get their computer fixed. Not to mention those that have lost all their work. GRRRR this makes me mad. Not to mention the 9 hours it took me to format my PC and get everything back the way it was.

I just ran this utility this afternoon and have lost all my pictures, graphics, files for the websites I have up, etc. I’m VERY unhappy!!

have a laptop with vista, ran the disk cleanup. it deleted the entire C drive. Need to complain to Microsoft, I think i will stay with Windows Xp

This is something that’s just happened to me. Luckily I keep most of my data on a separate hard disk to the OS, so it wasn’t touched. Still, I lost my Outlook files. This article really should be edited to warn unsuspecting readers of the problem.

I had the same problem and found this fix. It works great.
http://www.winhelponline.com/blog/serious-disk-cleanup-problem-caused-by-broken-registration/

Bought new laptop loaded with vista home premium,all was fine for the first few weks getting my head around the new os.As i used to do in XP,i had a look nat the disk cleanup,,told me i could free up huge amounts of space,so i went for it,,Watching in horror i saw files and folders that really should have been staying disappear managed somehow to stop it ,rebooted to a badly broken O.S.Luckily i was able to reset to “factory “,settings losing all i had put in over a few weeks,and start again,not too much damage done but it would have been really bad if it had been after 6 months or so.I havent tried to use it since but in looking at it it does’nt seem to offer the huge space gains as before ,maybe it has been fixed in sp1,anyone know??.I will be leaving it alone and using other ways of tidying up after myself,ones that I control

unfortunately i had this problem too.

when i do disk cleanup and saw that the error queue was over than 335gb!!!
FYI my HD just 250gb

i do the disk cleanup and BOOMM
my vista wont reebot again.

how can i solve this??

Shame on Microsoft. I have just lost all of my documents and email! How could they all this one to go unpatched! I missed the high GB figure in the utility and bang! All gone. This must be a major bug which they are whitewalling.

I tried all the restore progs. under the sun. Nothing. All gone. This is a serious issue with Vista which they are ignoring,

I have same problem with Q6600 Vista 64. Tech support could not solve my re-booting problem. I didn’t know the reason, neither the tech support told me about it. I returned the PC and got Q6700 Vista 64. Since then I did not touch the disk Clean-Up option. Thanks to all for the INFO.