Hard Drive space being reported incorrectly, why??

[defense]

I am hoping someone can help me with a pretty big problem i'm having when ripping a movie to my hard drive. I have a 40 gig maxtor and I have been using both DVD Decryptor and Smart Ripper. When I used DVD Decryptor in ISO mode, I realized when I went to delete the 4 GB or so file, it says to big to fit in the recycling bin "obviously", do you want to permanently delete it, I click Yes, and the file deletes, but the Hard drive still shows as if the file was never deleted. I started realizing this after I only had about 3 gigs of hard drive space left and I got an error that there wasn't enough Disk space to rip a movie. I was obviously shocked, so I had to conduct several tests. I couldn't even do a disk defragment because windows told me I need at least 15% HD space to conduct a defrag. Anyway, fortunately for me I keep a ghost back up of my system where I want it to be, that way if I get a virus, or something like this happens, I just reformat and transfer everything fresh. That is exactly what I did in this case, and tested a few things out. What I realized was that when I used other functions besides "ISO" mode in DVD Decryptor, and just made regular VOB files, and deleted them, it reported correctly, so I figured I could just use other methods and there would be no problem deleting things in the future. Well, that is what I thought, until I ripped as a test, a couple of movies I have, and when I went to delete them, my hard drive did show I deleted them, however, not accurately. I deleted one folder that was 4.5 GB, and when I checked my hard drive space, it showed that it was only 2 GB that was deleted. That is obviously better then not showing anything, but losing 2 GB per movie would still cause a ton of problems and who wants to continue to have to reformat everytime anyway. I have tried to check up and down and see what could be causing this. I am almost certain it has nothing to do with my hard drive, because when I deleted any program files manually or through add/remove, my drive reports that space perfectly. I thought it might be XP, so on the Windows support site there is an article pertaining to NTFS partitions which I do have, and it also states some other issues, but I don't think any of those apply to me. Has anyone else had this problem? If so, were you able to fix it or figure out why the disk drive space is being reported incorrectly? If anyone could supply any info on this big problem, I would really appreciate it.

[TripplexXx]

what windows are u using? xp home or xp prof?

[donalo]

Depending on your windows version run CHKDSK (for winNT/2000/XP) or SCANDISK (win98). This will recover your lost space. Run these from the command prompt.

There still seems to be a problem with your hard drive configuration. Check your bios to make sure the drive is configured properly.

[defense]

thanks for the replies. I am using XP Home, but with some help from another post a couple of days ago, I traced the problem to Norton Anti Virus which was protecting my recycling bin files, so everytime I deleted something, it would show "cleared" in the recycling bin, but norton still had those very files being protected. I had to "purge" all of those files with Norton, and then I disabled the auto protect function on the recycling bin. I freed up over 10 GB's of HD space. What a relief that was. Thanks for your help though