MY HARD DRIVE IS DISAPPEARING !!!!!!!

[JeffPr]

I have a 40 Gb hard drive over two drives. The C: drive is the regular hard drive with 37 Gb of space and the D: drive is a recovery drive with 3 Gb used. Windows XP uses around 4.5 Gb of my C: drive so I basically have 32 Gb free. The only problem is that under the C: drive I have 9 folders, program files, my documents etc. I clicked on properties to see the size of each folder and all together they are taking up a total of 9 Gb, but yet when I click on properties for the C: drive it says I am using 16 Gb. I am missing 7 Gb of my hard drive and I have no idea where it went. I could understand maybe a Gb or two but 7 is just ridiculous. Anybody have an explanation other than formatting my hard drive?

 

[bcastner]

It is easy to forget about the paging files, hibernation files and other uses by XP. There are additional issues as well:

http://support.microsoft.com/defaul...efault.aspx?scid=kb;en-gb;316505&ln=en-gb

 

[JeffPr]

Thanks for the info. You were right, some of my files were hidden and so when I could see all my files then the space was correct. I guess the problem that I was having is that I tried to install Mcafee virus scan on my computer and something weird happened during the installation and it wasn't installed correctly. So when the screen came up that said "restart computer for changes to take effect" I clicked yes. So when I restarted my computer it wouldn't boot up at all. It would just freeze on the screen that says welcome. So I figured I probably screwed something up.

Luckily my computer (as most new ones do) has a system recovery option at boot up screen so that is what I did. Everything worked fine except the system recovery uninstalled all my programs so I had to install them again, and it just left all my old files on the hard drive.
I basically went from a 26 Gb hard drive down to a 21 Gb hard drive after the system recovery. I can look in the C: drive and see all these old files that are just duplicates of my original files and they aren't doing anything but taking up space. I deleted some of the programs but I don't want to touch the windows files. When I did the system recovery did it make a duplicate of all my programs and windows files and if it did how do I get rid of them?

 

[bcastner]

Call the manufacturer of your computer and speak to tech support there. I suspect the System Recovery process required an earlier step that was not taken. They will know. Do not add anything else to the computer at the moment because I can almost gaurantee you that they will have you do the System Recovry again.