Mystery files filling disk partition?

[peegee]

I partitioned off a part of my second disk for 20Gb 'scratch' space (virtual memory for photoshop) but when I look at it in Disk managament or in Diskeeper, it is 95% full of... something

however, when I go to windows explorer, nothing appears to be there.
I have checked to 'Show Hidden Files' but still nothing shows. I do a search for *.* files on the partition, and still nothing shows up.

whats on there? any ideas - I need to know so I can move/delete/ free it up as I have a mystery set of files on there at present. how do I get to see what it is?

t.i.a.

paul

 

[JimPhelpsMI]

Hi, When you do a simple erase or delete etc. the data is not changed in any way. The directory (Folder) and the FAT table info is changed slightly. The first character of the File name in the directory is altered to a code telling the system that the space is again available and that fact is then marked in the FAT table by setting the proper bits back to clear telling the system where the newly available space is located on the drive. If you look at the drive with a drive editor you will find all the original data there thus the conception that you can always recover the data. True if it has not yet been overwritten. There are lots of programs that can do that. There is also junk left at the end of a file as the file doesn't always exactly fit the space allocation.

Hope this helps answer your questions, Jim

 

[porcorosso]

Did you UNcheck the "Hide protected operating system files" setting in Windows Explorer?