Where did my space go?!

[Tragic]

I was recently (a half hour ago) trying to free up some space on my hard drive. I deleted a ton of MP3s, uninstalled an old game or two, deleted dumb internet videos and went from having just under 4 gigs of free space to having just under 12 gigs of free space. Then my computer froze. Now when I check how much space I have free it says just udner 4 gigs again. All of the files I deleted are gone though.

Where the hell did my space go and how do I get it back? I'm running Windows 98, P3 533, with 64 megs of ram if that helps at all.

[Rtificial]

Did you try rebooting again? If it don't register it right then, its probably all saved as backup.

Your computer will save configue's and stuff so you can go back and fix problems. Take for example, you were screwing around and accidently deleted some files on windows you needed and screwed the comp up. Well you could go back to the save points on the computer and refresh and they'd be back. So that might be where they are since your computer crashed after you deleted that stuff.

I've had the same thing happen and had to go back and un-install and delete items again cause I didn't get to reboot after deleting it all.

[Brotherman]

housecall.antivirus.com

Could also be a virus that replicates itself on your drive filling up the space. Scan your computer just in case.

[Tragic]

Did you try rebooting again? If it don't register it right then, its probably all saved as backup.

Your computer will save configue's and stuff so you can go back and fix problems. Take for example, you were screwing around and accidently deleted some files on windows you needed and screwed the comp up. Well you could go back to the save points on the computer and refresh and they'd be back. So that might be where they are since your computer crashed after you deleted that stuff.

I've had the same thing happen and had to go back and un-install and delete items again cause I didn't get to reboot after deleting it all.

Well... all of the icons of things I deleted are gone. All of the things and folders I deleted aren't there.

Problem solved! I ran scandisk and suddenly the space is back.

[Lhadatt]

Sounds like that was a problem with the file allocation table. If it's not written correctly before the computer crashes, you can definately see that sort of problem. Running Scandisk usually fixes it.

[lithium]

Yup, almost certainly a FAT problem. If any changes to disk only occur in memory and don't get written back down before the computer is shut down, then the disk will get corrupted. This is the biggest reason why you have to explicitly shut down the computer as opposed to just turning it off.

An upgrade to XP and NTFS would greatly improve things like this, FAT is a terrible file system.