I am running win98SE on a 20GB Maxtor UMDA66 HD which has been partitioned in to 6 areas. I have recently been archiving large audio and visual files in both their raw state and as zip files and have noticed that my archive partition of 2.5GB is being reported as full when I try to save or move files to it. I have checked the drive status in 'My computer' and 'Explorer' which tell me that there is 1.8GB of space with 700MB of genuine files (this is correct). I have confirmed this with a number of small drive space utilities. However when I defrag my drive (either with Norton or the WIN98 own utility) it shows me that virtually all of the clusters are used up. The 'genuine' files are there but there is also a massive amount of other 'ghost' files hogging space. These files appear to have names such as 00000005.zip or 00000043.wav when I click on the relevant cluster in defrag. Something appears to be a bit odd here! The OS only recognises the genuine files on the partition yet the drive is holding a number of massive (100MB+)'ghosts' which I cannot get rid of. Is this a problem with win98 or is it something to do with the HD? If at all possible I would want to avoid formatting the whole disk and having to start from scratch!! Any help will be greatly appreciated!!

Sounds like either the recycle bin or the even more annoying "enhanced version" that is part of the norton utilities... got either running? Try emptying the recycle bin, and if you have "norton protection" running, give it the old flush.. See if that helps. If not, it's something else.
Don't reformat your drive! People jump to that far too quickly, it's a last resort only. http://www.PCGuide.com/ubb/wink.gif

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Charles M. Kozierok
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Cheers ixl, you are right! I was looking into the details of norton last night (I haven't been running it that long) and it was the protected recycle bin that was causing the problem. I have flushed out the old deleted files and removed the protection from the recycle bin.