[admin]

Don't reformat! We'll get it. Do you have an XP setup cd? Try this method first:
http://www.geekstogo...ws_XP-t138.html

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Didn't have time to download and do Tuneup, memory went from 203Mb to 165Mb to what's happened now.


Too late for me, just took 50 mins to startp up and then frozen screens and then a black screen on my desktop. This message is on my laptop and I need to try to recover stuff on the C: drive before doing a repair on the 40G drive. I also have data on the 120G drive where most of the real data is but my wife has a Fox based database which always installs on the damnned c: drive with no choices.


Oh well I guess I need to wait for the weekend.

[VeedeeBee]

Didn't have time to download and do Tuneup, memory went from 203Mb to 165Mb to what's happened now.


Too late for me, just took 50 mins to startp up and then frozen screens and then a black screen on my desktop. This message is on my laptop and I need to try to recover stuff on the C: drive before doing a repair on the 40G drive. I also have data on the 120G drive where most of the real data is but my wife has a Fox based database which always installs on the damnned c: drive with no choices.


Oh well I guess I need to wait for the weekend.

[Stephane]

Well, I did the repair thing.

Still had to re-install every piece of software that had anything to do with the C drive (that was Office, Project, Visio, Virtual PC, Adobe, Firefox, Thunderbird, Front page and on and on and on).

At least it fixed the System Restore which had never worked and I was able to delete my mysterious files without them popping back up again.

Conclusion...

I should have reformatted the C drive.

It would have been so much easier, a heck of a lot faster and it would have cleaned-up all the old leftover data from removed software or registry.

Norton cleansweep is what killed my programs data.
Norton is no longer on my computer!

What worked well...

Most of my programs are on a different partition, which saved me a lot of hassles;
All my documents are on another partition, and so are my backups (needed them to restore my outlook, Firefox and Thunderbird data);
And,
This group has some fantastic fellows that did spend a great deal of time trying to help me.

Thank you fellows!

[admin]

You're welcome. A fine example of why it's nice to have the OS on a separate partition.

If I were a betting man, I'd put good odds that CleanSweep was behind your mysterious files as well.

[VeedeeBee]

Well here was my problem, over the space of a week my c: partition went from on average 840 to 765MB spare in 4.7GB to 0.6MB, no reason, my swapfile is normally set at 756MB with 512RAM and the system ran remarkably smoothly for a small XP1700. The C: partition only had the operating system, the Anti Viruses (Sophos and AVG7), the cleaners (CCleaner, Webroot Washer and WinIt Destroy it) the AntiSpies (Ad-Aware SE1.05, Yahoo Anti-spy and Spybot S&D) and my wifes old programmes (clunky Foxpro type accountantancy packages that saved to Excel type files)

The c: partition was FAT32 as was the J: partition, D:, E:, F:, G: and H were NTFS as were the drives on the additional 120 GB disk.

Photoshop and Premiere scratch files were on the 120GB drive with lots of space over head (most partitions were 25GB).

I know I can restore the c: drive but my wife's accounting programmes very inflexibly would only install to c: due to the bespoke nature of the programmes, so we'd backup regularly(not every night though) before I try to restore the c: partition I need to try to recover the database files on the c:drive for work done from the last backup (23rd January 2005, crash was 26th January 2004)

Any ideas guys.

[VeedeeBee]

Just to say, my 40Gb disk was very broken using IBM's Disk fitness test (Smart 0x72 whatever that meant). I recovered nothing as the XP repair option stuck each time (up to 2-3 hrs after formatting the partition it would crash in windows setup). I've re-installed windows on the broken disk to save all the 120GB disk's data on CD's.

I'm waiting for a new disk and will rebuild the 40GB disk stuff from scratch luckily most data was backed up from 23rd Jan and my wife's work on C drive has reconciliation sheets (in Excel in the 26th Jan backup of the second 120GB disk).

Shame I don't have Raid on my MB now disks are so cheap. Am still none the wiser about the crash in the first place ie. diminishing disk space is this just false reporting on a dodgy disk? Or has my disk been virused (if you pardon the expression) The 40 GB disk is now running as a C: partition with 36GB free.