loss of memory

[Guest]

Last month i noticed that my hard drive was working overtime and before it
started i had 30 gigs of space left on my drive this.my drive is now quiet
but i only now have 10 gigs of space left ,i have lost 20 gigs.
i looked in search to see what was happening at the time the hard drive was
working overtime and i noticed that there was thousands of lines of letterers
and numbers,my drive is ok now as i have deleted some of the programs that i
had downloaded over the past few months that i dont use,could it be that i
downloaded a malisceous program?
ps what can i do to get the space back

 

[Chris Darnell]

You could low-level format your hard drive. Search Google for "low level
format", that should get some results.

 

[Rick \Nutcase\ Rogers]

Hi,

Start/run cmd, then run "chkdsk <drive>: /r", where <drive> is the drive
letter of the affected volume. If the drive is currently in use (mounted),
you will need to follow the prompts to have this check done when the system
is rebooted.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Associate Expert - WindowsXP Expert Zone

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org

 

[Yabbadoo]

Something created the "thousands of lines of letters and numbers" - a real
program that you instigated, or malware(virus, perhaps?) 20GB of data
creation - that's some data gain/space loss.
I'd do a THOROUGH scan of your drive with an on-line anti-virus checker
first (don't trust your own AV prog just yet) and see what shows up.
Then, download and use Spybot.
On the basis of those results (and corrections) perhaps that will solve the
problem.
If not, then consider other more drastic options (like re-frmat/reload from
scratch). If you do reload, please get AV and current definitions loaded,
likewise, get the firewall on - fast!

Good Luck! Len.