Hard Drive Space Is Gone!

I was using Adobe Premiere last night to render out to small files (about 500mb each) into one video file. I was going to transfer them to video tape so I didn't use any compression so I could retain the quality. I have a 40 gig hard drive and the video file was going to be around 25-30 gigs when it was finished.

Around the 20 gig mark (when the video file was about 85% done rendering) Premiere crashed and I had to restart.

Only problem is my hard drive still shows that the 20 gigs is being used. Now I have went from 25 gigs free space down to 9! When I checked the folder the file was supposed to go in there was no file to delete (and I have the "Show all hidden files and folder options checked).

I've been on the phone with Microsoft trying to find out how to free up the space but they had no idea.

Anyone ever ran into this problem?

 

What O.S are you running. If you have Win xp have you tried system restore?

 

I am running Windows XP but system restore is off (in order to spyware removed).

A Microsoft technitian had me try the advanced search but it didn't do the trick.

 

are you sure it isn't in your temp directory, as halo suggested? .. or in adobes temp dir? I use photoshop and it uses a scratch space, although I don't really know where it is off hand, you might check the preferences in adobe premiere to see where it is set, I remember a time where something simialr happened and sure enough it was a temp file hogging space in my HDD ... failing that, what does disk management say? can you view all your space there? might try an app like partition magic to recover that lost space ... though I doubt you'd be able to recover your data w/o spending mucho dinero at a data recovery service

 

Has your hard disk's total capacity changed? If your PC was writing to the hard disk when it crashed, there could be some corruption at hand. Sometimes, the file system does not finish writing data to sectors on the disk and it can make things seem bigger or smaller than they actually are, I had a problem once with a CD-R where my PC crashed during the burn process, (this was a looong time ago) and when I tried to view the properties, reported that there was a capacity of 2GB on the cd with 2GB free and 2GB used. Anyway, if this happens, it's advisable that you backup any important data, then try to retrieve the lost space using Partition Magic or PC Inspector File Recovery or something. If that doesn't work, I would format the drive. I don't like spending money on my PC if I can fix a problem myself. Even if the task is HUGE. Hence I would only take my drive to a Data recovery service If it was absolutely necessary, but that's your decision.

 

try some utilities! tuneup util. norton system works....... to regain youre space
if this not work..... try to format the partition!

 

Damn! I just spent all weekend long installing and configuring all my software with my recent reformat (which was on Friday) and now I have to do it again?

Is there some sort of drive copy software that will allow to me save all my configurations and just copy it over? I'd hate to have to go through all of it again.

I have an extra 17 gig hard drive installed.

 

I should read jamcgriff's reply ....

 

norton ghost should be able to copy all the data across. It writes all the data to an image and then writes all the data to the next disk exactly as it was on the first disk. I'm not sure, but there might be options to copy only your programs over and your registry. That's what you'd want to do, unless you have any documents that you need. I'd back those up to CD. More reliable.

 

goto C:\WINDOWS\temp or C:\winnt\temp ,,, what's in there? also use CCleaner