Odd drive space leak...

[Chris 96 WS6]

I have two drives, on a home-built WinXP system: a 120gb SATA system drive and a 20gb IDE backup drive.

I backup my docs, quicken, etc. to the 20gb drive. There's only about 4 gb of data on it. However, twice now I've gotten a "low drive space" balloon message from XP.

I go in and check properties and the 20gb drive will be at like 19.1 gb full. I check the contents, including hidden files, and like I said there's only 4gb of stuff on there.

I've even run Eraser and re-formatted it, still does it.

I'm not really sure what the source of such an even would be, why its filling up or what is filling it up. My only though is to wipe it and re-partition it and cross my fingers.

Suggestions?

 

[altheman]

Check what files you have with hidden system files showing. To do this, open folder options->view->select show hidden files, and then uncheck hide OS files.
After that, see which folder is using the most space. Also check for stuff like System Restore, and the amount of space allocated to it, and the size of the space allocated to IE via IE options.

 

[Chris 96 WS6]

I'm sorry I wasn't clear. I've already viewed the hidden files...there weren't any on the drive. Also, there's no folders on that drive. All the backup files are written directly to the root directory

Keep in mind the OS and files are on the other drive. This one is just to store backups.

 

[altheman]

That is strange. Try another format, I don't understand why that doesn't fix it

 

[SNGX1275]

You could check what the system restore status is on the drive. Right click on My Computer and go to properties then the system restore tab. Make sure that isn't set to use some incredibly high percentage of free space.

 

[Rik]

Have you checked the 20's integrity recently?

 

[Nodsu]

Yes, the filesystem may be bad. Check with chkdsk
The number of files that can be placed in a filesystem's root directory is limited. How many files do you have there?
You can try using a disk space mapping program like Sequoia View"