HELP I'm shrinking!!!!

[skeletor]

Well not me, my harddrive. I'm typing this on my laptop which has a 6gb HDD. Recently it's gone slightly strange, in that the HDD space seems to bounce around like crazy.

For example: Today I decide to burn the 480meg directory of downloads I have, onto a CD cause the HDD had only 200meg left. So I burn it, delete the directory from my HDD and instead of 200+480=680 my HDD tells me: "You had 200 meg, you freed 480meg, you now have.... SURPRISE 415meg!

So I think, lost clusters or windows going nutty. I run Norton Disk Doctor 2002 and sure enough it says "Lost clusters, windows incorrectly reporting this drive's free space etc". I think YAY! and tell NDD to fix those problems.

NDD says everything is fine and dandy so I check my free space.

My HDD tells me: You had 415meg, you fixed my craziness, so in return you now have: 350meg!

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!

I've scanned the disk, defragged the disk, surface scanned it three times on three different settings and it still is losing space. I should have over 1gig considering what I've deleted.

Some specs: 650 celeron, 192 meg ram, 6gig HDD, Windows ME (don't suggest changing, no choices at the moment), on start up I run:
Norton Anti Virus 2001 (up to date), Zone Alarm 3 pro and Windows messenger (which I close after booting).

Is my drive dying or can I do something to find out where this free space is going?

Please help!!

 

[Booster]

Delete the lost clusters. Unfortunately, after you've had some lost, your OS is likely to be corrupt... You need to reinstall anyway.
I suggest you repartition, reformat the drive and reinstall. If after that it will still act strange it will be apparent that it's dying.

 

[HappyPuppy]

Have you emptied the recycle bin?

 

[skeletor]

<< Have you emptied the recycle bin? >>



Yes. Everytime I go to Drive C: and hit F5 to refresh the free space it's changing.
Are laptop HDDs difficult to fit yourself?

 

[Booster]

<< Are laptop HDDs difficult to fit yourself? >>



I think they're pretty much the same HDs as desktop ones, only smaller and more reliable. If I were you, I'd reinstall. When I was using ME, I had to reinstall every couple of months (for some reason everything was getting screwed up gradually). I just didn't have a good luck with ME. The only way to get rid of the problem is a clean install, IMO.