GHOST FILES, PLEASE HELP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Guest
  • Start date Start date
G

Guest

My computer contracted a virus and died a slow death. I used my Recovery CD
to reinstall Windows. The problem is that I only have a fraction of my
harddrive space available. I ran disk defragmenter and noticed it was
shifting files with names of stuff like songs, images, etc. from my computers
previous life. How can A) recover these files or B) remove them so I at least
have the space free again.

Please any and all help is greatly desired and appreciated! Thank you!!
 
You obviously did a "repair" re-installation, since your data(mp3's, images)
is still there.

If you have a 3rd party back-up utility, back all these up to CD's. If not,
just "drag and drop" them onto CD's - once you are certain they are on yr
CD's, delete the files.
You should perhaps do a thorough clean-up first, to delete everything you no
longer need. After the cleab-up and CD backup, run defrag again.

Since you have such a lot, consider buying a new HDD to store your data ?
Clearly the current one isn't big enough!

Sincerely, Len.
 
Hello

My advice would be to reformat your drive, on the recovery
cd you have 2 options, 1 to just do a recovery where it will re-install
the applications, and option 2 it will reformat the drive in this case
that means what ever data is on the drive you will lose, keep that
in mind.

Alvin
 
I cant, thats my problem. Somewhere they exist in my computer, but they are
ghosts. There is no filename in any folder, subfolder, etc with a matching
name to say Beethoven.mp3. How do I find the files again is my question? Is
there a way, or do I have to do like Alvin says and utterly nuke my computer?
 
TechnoDumbass said:
My computer contracted a virus and died a slow death. I used my Recovery
CD
to reinstall Windows. The problem is that I only have a fraction of my
harddrive space available. I ran disk defragmenter and noticed it was
shifting files with names of stuff like songs, images, etc. from my
computers
previous life. How can A) recover these files or B) remove them so I at
least
have the space free again.

Please any and all help is greatly desired and appreciated! Thank you!!
Click to expand...

Do a search for one of the file names that you're sure exists and you'll
probably find the rest of them. Chances are that the computer created a new
user (yes, even if you used the same name) and the old files are still under
the old user's name. You may also have managed to do a parallel install,
which means you've got 2 copies of Windows in the same partition.

You might be best off copying the files you need to save and then doing a
clean install since you aren't sure what you've done.
 
Back
Top