Part of my Harddrive "Disappeared" - Help Please?

[houtx67]

Hello,

My computer went off due to a brief power outage at the tail end of processing a burn by IC7 (with latest upgrade). The DVD must have been nearly done because it plays on my Panasonic but not my picky Toshiba (which usually will at least have blocky play even on bad media).

However, a part of my harddrive about the same size of the original DVD file has disappeared (~7 GB). I have run Sequoia and file searched by file size and nothing shows up. I have tried reducing the space allocated to "System Restore" with no luck. When I try to have Windows check for disc errors, it says that it cannot because an application is trying to write to the drive (with everything closed on my machine). This leads me to believe that the power outage caused IC7 to permanently appear to be writing to the drive.

I am using Win ME on a 700 P3 with 384 RAM (which has never caused a problem for me before on any burns/backups). I have since burned again with IC7 successfully, too. The computer appears to work fine otherwise. Since I only have a 30 GB drive, I would really like to get back the missing 7GBs.

Does anyone have any suggestions for troubleshooting? Can I find and turn off the mystery application that is attempting to write to the drive, or at least make Win ME see that it stopped? Since I can't "see" the files, or the partition missing, only the reduced capacity, is there anything I can do short of reformatting the harddrive and starting over from scratch? I am going to try unistalling IC7 if no one has any other suggestions for resolution.

ANY help is greatly appreciated...

[Solarjetman]

Try using a boot disk and running scandisk.

[gmatov]

I think the last time that happened to me scandisk stopped because of an error and said to run it from within Windows.

That didn't work, either, nor Norton Disk Doctor. Wound up moving the data to another disk and fdisk/format, complete.

In my case it was something like 20 gigs of space lost.

Sorry if this is bad news. For me, no other option. For you, if that relatively small drive is the only one, probably devastating.

No cheers, this case,

George

[houtx67]

I forgot to mention that I did try the bootdisk method to a point a couple of days before the incident when everything was fine. I did also try scan disk (which is where I get the error that another application is trying to write to the disk).

[gmatov]

Hout,

You might just possibly try running Scan Disk from Safe Mode. I think it's limited, but might work. At least nothing should be trying to write to it.

BTW, you did mention that in your first post, the writing, I mean. You're giving us enough info.

[RabidDog]

seven gb lost from 30gb = 23gb ... certainly could be ghosted off to 3 or 4 dvdr then reformat and restore...basically backup and then reformat then restore. Or for added safety re-install all apps and os and just backup your data. Or borrow a hard drive from someone to backup you stuff for a weekend.

[houtx67]

Thanks to gmatov and all who posted.

I took gmatov's suugestion and ran Scandisk in Safe Mode. It wouldn't complete scanning the surface area due to the above problem, but it did let me scan the existing files. This didn't correct the problem, but when I ran Disk Defragmenter in Safemode, the lost space returned .

This saved me from having to remove then re-install IC7, and possibly ultimately having to reformat the disk.

Hopefully this will work for anyone else who has this problem in the future (and comes upon this post).