I need help. I have a Dell Precision Workstation that one of my departments uses for modeling. They have 3 40 GB drives installed. On this one drive E the user deleted a 29 GB file. When he tried copy a new file to the volume it told him he was out of disk space. We checked the recycler folder for this volume and it is empty but the disk is reporting only 2.5 GB of free space. In the recycler folder there is one of those ghost files and it is 29 GB. I do not want to delete that bin because I know it will cause issues. I have applied SP4 for Windows 2000. I have ran chkdsk and defragmented the drive. We have tried all the different settings on the bin. I have set the limit down to 1%, 0% but still the ghost file sits there. I could just format the volume but will it happen again? I am not sure if it because he tried to delete so much data? Any ideas would be great. Thanks. Anna

What issues? you could store it onto a network drive. otherwise you'd have to compress and store it onto a ton of cd disks. if you go that route, skip the cd thing and go for DVD-RW. they can hold up to 3GB per side. That ghost image of the deleted file has to go. The purpose of the recycling bin is to take the filename out of the current file list. The file is still there taking up space until you empty the recycling bin.

The recycle bin is empty thats the whole problem. You cant empty it. there is a file that looks like a ghost and it is 29 GB but that is the actually bin itself. You go to dos and the folder says it is empty. Very weird.

how about the ghost's file attributes?

Have you tried to delete the file in safe mode? I'm not sure but I would think if it looks ghost like that means it is a Hidden file. That is a really huge file to delete..I find it hard to understand that a 40 GB drive has a 29GB file in it....I would want to find out what the file contained cus 29 gig is ALOT of data. Alsosometimes you need to reboot after deleting so much stuff, then you should see space gained. I don't know if this is any help but something to think about...

I had this problem too, I thought I was going insane because Explorer said i had 1.09 gigs left on my 120 gig hard drive, but when I selected all the files (even the hidden ones) it said like 52 gigs used. So anyways the problem I had was there's this cool problem with the recycle bin. Anyways sometimes the files don't get deleted and this folder RECYCLER is a hidden system file and you usually can't see it. Inside there's tons of stuff indexed and I even found weird references to stuff I had half a year ago. To get rid of if you need to use the command prompt and the link below basically shows you how to do it. http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/Win2000/Q_20650647.html Hope this helps you. If this doesn't do the trick you can e-mail me and I can rack my brain for a better solution.