Excessive drive space used after XP repair

[albertyay]

I damaged my motherboard while installing a fan, and I replaced it with one that uses Geoforce2 instead of KT600. I used my Windows XP Pro disk and performed a repair (automatic) as opposed to a full reinstall.

The repair worked, but I lost a lot of personal files. I was able to recover the personal files and save them to another drive using a free utility. However, my boot drive is showing about 15 gig of used space, but I only find around 6 gig of data on the disk using Windows Explorer.

It seems like maybe the personal data I lost is still showing as used disk space, but I cannot access it using Windows.

Any thoughts on how to fix this, or if it might be another issue?

Thanks.

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My System:

MB: Gigabyte 7NF-RZ
Proc: Athlon XP 3200+
Mem: 1gig Corsair Value Select 2.5
Boot HD: 160gig Deskstar, 8mb cache
2nd HD: 160 gig Barracuda, 8mb cache
OS: Windows XP Pro

 

[tiap]

Boot and run with a linux system os cd. I forget the flavor but have used it before