Folder called $RECYcLE.BIN

Hi, when I compress the contents of one of my drives, I see it going through files inside a folder called $RECYcLE.BIN, right clicking and going to properties reveals this folder to be over 7gb in size but when I go into it there's nothings there. I have show hidden files enabled and also show hidden operating system files.

How can I free up the space taken by $recycle.bin?

It's probably stashed full of temp files or something. Some of these files are invisible under the "Hide protected system files" option...Appart from that try and check what was in the recycle bin on the OS that is on that drive, maybe thats where the answer is.

It not in the recycle bin, I noticed files that I deleted long ago. I'm gonna check the recycler folder. See what I can find.

Hmm, the only thing I can think of to free up this space is to boot into bartpe or something and delete the folder from there. I'll try this later though.

If that is how it is actually spelled, it is not the true recycle bin, it is a bit of malware (if 7Gb can be called a 'bit')

If you didn't misspell it, I would run chkdsk /r which will check for faults in your filesystem when you reboot. It might tell you it recovered 7Gb of space ! http://vlaurie.com/computers2/Articles/chkdsk.htm It will take a very long time.

I booted up with bartpe, and deleted the big Recycle.bin folder which freed up the space.

Recycler has always been there, I've seen it for years. It was the Recycle.bin folders that somehow malfunctioned and decided to just grow and grow.

I didn't delete the Recycle.bin folder on the root of the drive, I went into it and found many more folders all called Recycle.bin (with the recycle bin icon). I deleted those.