FS9-related computer hiccup

[SSI01]

I'm still in the middle of transferring files from the FS9 installation on E drive to the new ones on the external drive. The transfer was going smoothly for the last week or so until this morning. My computer became very sluggish, would not empty the Recycle Bin on C drive except one item at a time, and very slowly at that. I shut down and restarted and that seemed to cure the problem until I checked the properties of the E drive, where the older FS9 iterations are located. I have worked a LOT of space off that drive, freeing up many gigs with this transfer until it was just shy of having 50% available space. A short time ago I opened up the drives and wanted to get started transferring more files. My computer now tells me E drive is 100% full, with no available space; I was thinking maybe if I ran a disk cleanup that would help with the problem. I've started the disk cleanup but get the dialog box saying, "Disk Cleanup cannot clean up drive E:\. Make sure that there is a disk in the drive. Press OK to select another drive." There shouldn't be a disk in E drive, it's a hard drive on the machine, not the CD drive. What's happened?

[Motormouse]

I suspect you have the box 'clear scenery cache on exit' unchecked?

Fs has filled drive with scenery caches... well that's my theory..

Ttfn

Pete

[Tom Clayton]

It's also possible (don't know how likely though) that your E: could be about ready to crap out. If you want to try bypassing the recycle bin in the meantime, try using the Shift+Del key combo, or hold the shift key down as you drag items to the bin. Either method should bypass the bin and do a straight delete. Beyond that, you may need to carry at least the drive to a real tech to see if the data can be recovered.

[SSI01]

Thanks for the advice, gents. I didn't know you could bypass that recycle bin that way but I'm going to give it a try. I'm going to run some checks either tonight or after seeing the dentist in the AM, when I'm a little more rested. I'll let you know how that goes.

EDIT: Holy cats! I'd been gone for a while before I sent the above msg; just hit "start" - "computer" - and looked for "E" drive which has now totally disappeared. Absent some method to get the computer to re-recognize the drive, I may be looking at being off the air for a while to see if the contents can be transferred to a new drive.

[Tom Clayton]

I was afraid of that. It sounds like the drive finally took a big ol' stinky one. From the earlier symptoms you described, my layman's guess is that something happened to the master file table. A tech with forensic software should be able to pull of quite a bit of what is on the drive if that's the case. That type of program reads the entire image, not just the file table.

[SSI01]

Glad to hear that, Tom. Trust me, I never do anything by half-measures, when something goes belly-up it really goes.

There is a tech down the main drag here, a good one, who told me some time ago the forensic recovery tools now available for issues like this can almost always recover what was on the disk, or a good-sized portion of it. I've had it happen in the past and always got back what was there.

I'll be gone for a little while to get this sorted out, will check back in when it's over and a new "E" drive is installed.

[Mick]

Several years ago I had one of those coincidences happen that aren't ever supposed to happen: my hard drive and the external drive where everything was backed up both went belly up at the same time.

The guys at my local confuter shop were able to retrieve almost everything. Only a small handful of files were lost. It was fairly expensive but worth it.

So there is hope!

Good luck!