My Hard Drive is getting eaten up.

[Jp425]

I don't know what happened to my hard drive free space. I decided to do some cleanup and remove old videos and files. When I started I had about 110 gigs of free space. I used the program 'eraser' to do the deletion.

After I deleted some videos and things I ended up with only 28 gigs of free space. Now theres some files I can't delete, not with regular delete, eraser, or my Kaspersky "Incinerator" program.

Some files are huge, like this one :
http://i122.photobucket.com/albums/o240/loop429/ff4.jpg?t=1199581287

It is 50 gigs, how could I delete this?

What happened to my hard drive? How do I get my free space back? It seems it just disappeared.

 

[dude_se]

right click the drive in my computer. go to properties. go to tools. run error checking. try that

 

[donutdan4114]

I think your computer backed up all your info somehow... I think those large files are like backups... It may not let you delete them if it thinks it is crucial backup data...

This program has always worked for me...
http://www.jumbo.com/file/39039.htm
Zilla Data Nuker

 

[Jp425]

Thanks for the replys, I wonder if I should just to a fresh install, since i have other problems as well, like windows explorer no longer works.

I've never done a reinstall so am kind of nervous i will screw it up.

Basically do i just put my windows cd in, restart keep pressing delete (or what button is it to get into bios?), then tell it to boot from cd, then just follow the steps?
I won't need any new drivers will I for my speakers, motherboard, video card etc?
Windows detect these automatically?

 

[worshipme]

If you are running Vista, disable System restore. It just eats up tons of HDD space.

 

[Jp425]

If you are running Vista, disable System restore. It just eats up tons of HDD space.

I am running windows xp professional sp2,

but I do have vista on my laptop. Thanks for that tip.

 

[donutdan4114]

formatting is easy... but depending on your hardware, its a good idea to get all the drivers that you'll need before you format... you should have them anyway, like on a flash drive... you don't wanna find out after you format that your NIC won't work without drivers... Perhaps list your specs?

 

[worshipme]

Thanks for the replys, I wonder if I should just to a fresh install, since i have other problems as well, like windows explorer no longer works.

I've never done a reinstall so am kind of nervous i will screw it up.

Basically do i just put my windows cd in, restart keep pressing delete (or what button is it to get into bios?), then tell it to boot from cd, then just follow the steps?
I won't need any new drivers will I for my speakers, motherboard, video card etc?
Windows detect these automatically?

It is very simple really. Just change the boot order in the BIOS so the CD/DVD drive boots first, then save and restart, when you are prompted to press any key to boot from CD/DVD do so and then follow the on screen instruction. Be sure that you back up all of your data that you don't want to lose first as a reinstall of an OS involves deleting everything on the HDD. When you have you fresh reinstall, you will need to download the latest drivers for you GPU etc.

 

[Jp425]

formatting is easy... but depending on your hardware, its a good idea to get all the drivers that you'll need before you format... you should have them anyway, like on a flash drive... you don't wanna find out after you format that your NIC won't work without drivers... Perhaps list your specs?

I just checked belarc advisor and my specs are these:

motherboard: ASUSTeK Computer INC. M2V-TVM Rev 1.xx

Video card: 2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core ( I don;t know what model this is)

Hard drive: 250.06 Gigabytes Usable Hard Drive Capacity (again it doesn't list what company or model this is)

Processor: 2.00 gigahertz AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core

Memory: 1024 Megabytes Installed Memory

Monitor: DELL E228WFP

Realtek AC'97 Audio for VIA ( the audio is integrated, do i need drivers for this)

So basically which drivers should I download, all of them?

Then after i installed my fresh windows xp....do i first install the motherboard driver, then video card driver, then processor driver? what is the correct order.

 

[Jp425]

It is very simple really. Just change the boot order in the BIOS so the CD/DVD drive boots first, then save and restart, when you are prompted to press any key to boot from CD/DVD do so and then follow the on screen instruction. Be sure that you back up all of your data that you don't want to lose first as a reinstall of an OS involves deleting everything on the HDD. When you have you fresh reinstall, you will need to download the latest drivers for you GPU etc.

thanks, i think it will be worth it in the end.