Deleting files but harddrive space does not change ... ??? huh...

Ok, I have recently encoutered an awkward problem with my hard drive and I am not sure what to do about it....

I have one harddrive, 40Go, split into two sections, one with 10 Go, the other with 30Go.

Just this morning, I trashed some large files on my 30Go D drive, emptied my trash bin, and I had more space... everything worked fine. Now recently I installed a large program, and realized that I only have 650mb left on my drive, so I trashed 750mb file... no problem here... I now had 1.4Go free. Everything still working as usual. Then I had a wreird crash and I had to turn my computer off (the bad way). After I rebooted, my D drive was back to 650mb for no reason, and the 750mb file I deleted was still gone. I then moved a 650mb file from that same drive to my C drive. It filled up my C drive, but my D drive STILL read 650mb. I rebooted... still the same read.

Basically here is the problem...

My drive capacity is 28.5Go, it says I am using 27.8Go. When I check all the files in the drive... it says the size and disk size adds up to only 25.7Go! I should have at least 2 free GB on my drive according to what is in it!

I am afraid to delete or move anything out of the drive because I might loose more space!

I had a friend who had this problem about 5 or 6 years ago and he bought a new harddrive... anyone ever had this problem happen to them? Certainly there must be some way to fix this!

 

Have you done a scan disk, disk-cleanup, defrag? Are we talking Windows 98, 2000 or XP here? Hidden files, temp files, size of swap file? This larger partition/drive is not your system-boot partition is it? (ie. it is your D: drive and your PC boots from the smaller C: drive) There are a few things that can be done to "clean up" a drive, could you give us a little more info? It sounds weird, I hope the HDD isn't starting to deteriorate.

 

I am running Windows XP Professional... My system boots on the C Partition... neither drives are compressed...

I have done every possible registry and drive cleanup including defrag with TuneUp Utilities 2006.

 

Well, not having the experience I can suggest nothing more than what can be found by going to Google and searching "lost hard disk space". If it were a HDD I could back up all needed files from, I would do so and then delete and remake the (D partition, reformat and see if the original Gb size was all there again, but only if backup and such tinkering were ok to do on a PC that was not a serious productivity, mission critical one and I had a few hours to re-install everything afterward. I'm thinking this might be ok if your C: drive/partition can save a lot of your settings and vital files, but a CD/DVD backup might be wise too. It may be that a new hard disk is a good idea if this one is starting deteriorate.

 

I'm sure you know how to do this but just in case

Start > Settings > Control Pannel > Add/Remove Programs. And see if the program is still there. If it is a actual program just sending it to the Trash won't remove it from your harddrive just the icon part.

 

You could use windows search to find files over a certain size. Just check advanced options.