interesting problem...

S

SwanBeeCh

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 21, 2005
Messages
295
setup:

i'm working for a small computer repair shop in the mountains. i recently had a customer bring in a pc with, as far as i can tell, a fairly unique problem.

problem:

this is an hp machine with xp media center edition 2005 installed. the information i was given from the customer was that after rebooting one day, his computer gave him the "recovered from a serious error message".
generally a good thing, but he was missing some data.

after looking into it a bit further... when you open the c drive properties... it shows a total of 12 gigs of data.

we can account for 7 gigs when looking individually at each folder (hidden ones included).

5 gigs are missing.

we're fairly certain this is the data that he's looking for and can't find.


any ideas?
 
I'm sure you've done the obvious, like making sure that 5 gigs are not system restore data, and that you have run chkdsk?
 
yep.

the restore is a seperate partition.
i chkdsked it, and scanned it with norton and webroot spysweeper.

it's definitely the data that he says he's missing...
and it's literally there, but missing.
 
Maybe a giant swap file? 5 gigs is quite over sized but maybe something to take into account. Oh, and when you say system restore data are you meaning the actual copy of software that is used to restore the computer back to its original state? The system restore data I believe xxEIEIOxx is talking about is the Windows system restore. Go to your system properties, System Restore tab and check your settings there. It should be set to a percentage of your hard drive but should also display total amount in MB or GB that it will use.

Try doing a file search for *.* on the drive in question. Make sure you can see all hidden and system files. When the scan is finished Ctrl+A, right click on a file, Properties (could take a while to calculate total files and folders) and check total size of everything that way. Just an off the wall way to check your files and space consumption. I have to do it before to help account for space just as you are trying to do.

If you can have the drive hooked up through an external setup or something to another computer the file calculation goes much faster.
 
I would suggest windirstat or SpaceMonger on it to see what is taking up the space where... sometimes a virus or windows itself will have some bloated temporary files, the windows stuff could be cleaned off with CCleaner.
System Restore can also take up several gigs of space if left unchecked for years.
 
System restore is capped at half of a gig. And windirstat doesn't show the same file size as the hard drive properties.... it's... about 5 gigs smaller.

So basically, this guy is out of luck.

He doesn't want to spend any more in labor.

Thanks for all of the advice :)
 
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