I have a 40G Hard Drive. A scan of the drive says I have used 28G. However 'My Computer' says I only have 500meg of space left.

I was told some years ago that if the PC crashes (which it does from time to time) it backs up data in files like 001.chk, 002.chk etc, and if you delete these you will recover the missing disk space.
A scan of Files, Folders & Text cannot locate such files.
Can anyone advise on how to recover the missing disk space?
I recently deleted a lot of files to free up space but the first time it crashed I lost all the space!! Thanks in anticipation.

Hamster1069, sounds a lot like your index.dat file. Over time, it can get HUGE and ME can't list handling it among it's strong points. There's a script around to delete it. Sadly I can't point you to it, maybe someone can? Think it's titled 'delindex.bat', not sure.
I run XP and CCcleaner deals with it nicely, but ME? Dunno. Worth a try 'cuz that's probably easiest.
There's a fairly long, complex routine to do that manually that I can post if you need it. Just post again if you need it.
ME was notorious for poor memory management and if you haven't done it, STRONGLY recommend you do what's suggested in 'Trev's Tweaks ...' @:
http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtw...
Really helped me a LOT.
HTH.
Ed in Texas.

A "scan of the drive"? Is the drive partitioned or is it just one huge partition? Do you have Windows set to show "all hidden files & folders"?

Go to MyComputer, right click on C:, then select Properties...what is shown in the pie diagram?

- Drive is one huge partition.
- All hidden files and folders set to show - yes
- Capacity 37.2G, Used 36.6, Free 614mb

There you go...your HDD is almost full & you're running out of room for the swap file. You're gonna have to free up a lot more space than just 614MB.

how big is the restore folder?

larry

Hello Hamster1069 , Ed in Texas's advice ,as usual , is sound and Ccleaner works well with Windows ME . But I was wondering if you have enough disk space left to download it to .Clearly you need more room.
From Desktop right click Internet Explorer>>properties>>general & delete cookies and delete files >> Reboot & defrag,
Also search for and delete all occurrences of Normal.dot this is a Word for windows template if it is corrupt will fill your disk
Other things that you may want to try are
Clear old System Restore points.
Start>>settings>>control panel>>system>>performance>>file system>>troubleshooting and tick Disable system restore>>apply but do NOT click ok instead close the box with the x in the top right corner you should then see a box advising you to reboot ,To enable it again do the same but of course untick
How many deleted Email do You have ?
how many progs do you have that you never use?
Incidentally Ccleaner slim can be found at WWW.MAJORGEEKS.COM freeware

'Used space' is still used space regardless of whether the files are hidden. What type of scan told you only 28 gig was used?

Thanks to everyone who has commented so far.

To bring you up to date:
I use CCleaner and have done for about 12 months.
I scanned for Index.dat, restore folder, and Normal.dot files and there was nothing significant.
I scanned my hard drive with Treesize which says there are only 28 Gig used.
After reviewing the content of some of the files I realised I backed up a 3gig file, which if I had forgotten about it may explain why I thought the space suddenly disappeared.

Anyway for now lets hope 3gig is enough for now, and I'll get back if space 'disappears' again.

Cheers

A 40 gig drive partitioned as FAT32 would have a cluster size of 32 KB. That means a file smaller than 32 K would still be allocated 32 K of space on the drive. A file between 32 and 64 K will take up 64 K of space and so on.

So you can see the total size of all the files will always be smaller than the total space taken up by the files.

Maybe Treesize is using using the former figure and your OS is using the latter. It still seems like quite a difference but it's the best explanation I can think of.

You can safely delete the following:
=================================================
csrss.exe = malware
*.bad = registry files that the system marks as bad
*.bak = duplicate (backup) files (you many not want to delete these)
*.bmk = windows bookmarks
*.chk = ScanDisk disk error files
*.cnt = Help tables of contents
*.diz = Program description files (usually from Zip folders)
*.dmp = memory dump files
*.ftg = WordPerfect help file
*.fts = temporary files recreated by Windows Help
*.gid = Generated InDex (help) files
*.idx = quick finder information file
*.old = copy of older version (you may not want to delete these)
*.prv = log files created by past windows boot-ups
*.shs = scrap object
*.syd = temporary backup files
*.tmp = temporary files
*.$*= temporary files
*.~*= temporary files
~*.*= temporary files
*.??~=temporaary files
*.??$=temporary files

You can also delete thumbs.db files, which will be rebuilt. These are databases of thumbnails for picture files. The never get smaller, even if you delete the original pictures.

Use Delindex to delete index.dat files and other junk files:
Download Delindex 5.1 and try it.

I've found turning off system restore doesn't always clean house like it's supposed to do.

In WinMe, there is the hidden directory c:\_Restore. Within this are five sub-directories.

Archive
Temp
Extract
SFP
Logs

The last three are usually empty or only have a couple of files. Archive and Temp, however, grow. Part of that is the System Restore files if you have that service on.

To delete the files in the Archive and Temp folders, you need to use your DOS boot disk and delete them manually.

To make the directories appear in Windows, use the following command:

Attrib -r -s -h c:\_Restore

Change the name of the appropriate directory as needed.

This will make it visible. Windows will make it a system folder on the next reboot, but it will be visible in Explorer is you turn on the feature in your folder view options.

I usually wipe both of these directories completely. One client I did this for recovered 130Meg of hard drive space.

CCleaner will get the files in the Content.IE5 directory. Usually, when I'm in DOS, I'll go into the windows directory and just delete the "Tempor~1" directory; windows will recreate it on the next windows session.