Missing Disk Space on an External Hard Drive

[hef2k]

I have an ACOM 120 GB drive I use for backup that is acting strangely.
If I use windows explorer it shows no files in the root, and a total of
80GB in three folders. Checking properties shows almost 120GB in use. I
cannot find the missing 40GB! Using the XP tool to clean up the drive
only offers about 2MB that could be recovered by compressing old files.
My best guess is that for some reason when the old windows backup files
(*.bkf) were deleted the space was not recovered.

What's going on here????

Below is a Disk Doctor report:

Norton Disk Doctor
Tue Oct 25 14:26:43 2005

*************************
* Report for Drive N: *
*************************

DISK INFORMATION
----------------

The type of the file system is NTFS
Volume Name is ACOM 120 GB
Volume Serial Number is 28F3xxxx

117218240 KB total disk space.
116221873 KB in 7448 files.
2596 KB in 232 indexes.
0 KB in bad sectors.
149120 KB in use by the system.
65536 KB occupied by the log file.
844650 KB available on disk.
512 bytes in each allocation unit.
234436481 total allocation units on disk.
1689301 allocation units available on disk.


SYSTEM AREA STATUS
------------------

No errors in the system area



FILE STRUCTURE STATUS
---------------------

No errors in the file structure



INDEXES STATUS
--------------

No index errors



SECURITY DESCRIPTORS STATUS

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

If NDD tells you that your disk is full then it is full!
You now have to find out what you're storing on it -
one of the following free tools might help you:

DriveUse:
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/index.html
Bullet Proof Folder sizes: http://www.foldersizes.com/

 

[hef2k]

So, the culprit is Norton nprotect, the protected recycle bin program
that sneaked in with the Norton Anti-virus "bloatware". Apparently
nprotect uses root kit technology to hide it's "recycled" file folder
from XP and most programs that use the XP API, even if preferences in
Windows Explorer are set to show hidden files and folders. The
FolderSize program that Pegasus suggested exposed this rascal and
allowed me to delete it. (Thanks, Pegasus) I had even checked that the
Norton Protected Recycle was not enabled on the external drive, but
maybe it had been enabled at some time so Norton had hidden the large
backup files that I had deleted and thus used up the space. The space
was not available, since I had tried to do a backup and it ran out of
disk space.

Bad nprotect, BAD!