C drive full - Windows 8.1 crash

rwg917

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My wife's Asus laptop X205T has an onboard SSD. The C drive is 20 gig. Recovery drive is probably 12 gig. She was saving her work to a flash drive and deleting the files from the pc to keep from filling up the C drive, but procrastinating stopped her from doing this. C drive is full. Windows 8.1 boots all the way up to the desktop screen then starts cycling between the desktop background color and her regular background with picture and desktop icons. The cycles are less than a second. I can't open anything from within Windows. I could probably do a complete restore to fix the pc but would lose all her files.
Is there any way to access her files? Can I get Windows to settle down long enough to empty the recycle bin and start deleting files?
 
I don't think this is being caused by the drive being full.

There are recovery tools that Microsoft offers that can solve your problems and keep your files intact. You can also try booting into "safe mode" and get your files from there just to be safe: https://www.howtogeek.com/107511/how-to-boot-into-safe-mode-on-windows-8-the-easy-way/

Just to be clear, the problem only starts when the desktop is loaded?

Is this similar to the problem you are having? http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/fix-windows-10-screen-flashing-problem/
 
Clone her drive onto a larger drive. Don't worry about the recovery partition. You will have to use a different computer (obviously) but it is not difficult to do. Since her drive is so small I am guessing that it is IDE so finding an interface cable may be a bit fun but I figure Newegg or Amazon will have it.

Have you tried booting into safe mode?
 
Thanks for the help, but so far, no luck.

I booted into safe mode but the pc does the same thing as in normal mode except the background is black and says safe mode.

Here are the basic specs on this laptop:
Model: ASUS EeeBook X205T
Processor: Intel® Bay Trail-T Quad Core Z3735 1.33 GHz Processor
Operating System: Windows 8.1
Memory: DDR3L 1333 MHz SDRAM, 2 GB
Storage: 32GB eMMC

The "hard drive" is a 32GB solid state chip soldered to the motherboard so it is not removable or replaceable by your average consumer.

When this laptop first started doing this, I tried for days to find a solution but couldn't find one. It set untouched for about a month. A couple of days ago, I plugged in the charger and turned it on. It booted up to the desktop screen and did not do the cycling I had described in my initial post. All the desktop icons that are normally there were missing. I could not find a way to to open anything. I decided to plug in a flash drive to see if File Explorer would open and it did. I looked at the C drive and the bar was almost full and colored red. It is about 20GB in size and it only had 74MB of free space.

I was able to copy all of the files from the Documents folder to the flash drive. I did not have the option of moving the files. I wanted to empty the recycle bin so I could start deleting files from the laptop. I minimized File Explorer to go to the recycle bin icon, forgetting that there were no icons. I looked to the taskbar to restore File Explorer, but nothing was minimized there. I tried shortcut keys to restore File explorer, but nothing worked. I should have continued copying files to the flash drive while I had the chance, but I didn't know File Explorer would vanish.

Describing again what the laptop is doing, when you turn it on, everything is normal as it boots all the way to the desktop background with taskbar. A half second later, icons start to appear in the notification area of the taskbar. A half second after that, the desktop icons appear. To this point, everything happens as normal. Then about a half second later, the screen turns solid blue (welcome screen color), a split second later the taskbar appears, and the cycle begins – desktop, icons, blue background, desktop, icons, blue background, over and over.

There are still other files in the Downloads folder that I need as well as some files on the desktop.
 
Does it do the same on Safe Mode? That should indicate it's not a driver problem.

I'm afraid I never run into this problem. It could be a virus, but I doubt it's because the storage is full.
 
Sounds like an issue with the user profile. If you can use the computer in safe mode like AMD said then start there. Clear up some space, if that doesn't resolve it, use safe mode to create a new user profile.
 
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