Missing files and space on hard drive

It appears a large chunk of my hard drive is occupied by files I
cannot find.

The PC has a 10.8 GB hard drive (Maxtor 91080D5) which FDISK reports
is partitioned 74% for C: and 26% for D:. The D drive looks fine - it
has about 25 MB on it with about 2.5 GB free.

The problem is on C: I can only find 2.7 GB worth of data and 700 MB
free space (as reported by "DIR /ah /a /s" when run from C:\ with the
PC booted in MS-DOS mode) for a total of only 3.4 GB. This reports a
count of just under 17,000 files.

Windows (98SE) Explorer shows the drive as having about 7 GB worth of
files and 700MB free, with a total capacity of just under 7.7 GB.

Scandisk reports no errors, with the following stats:

8 million KB in total disk space (ok)
0 bytes in bad sectors (good platters)
35 million bytes in 3746 folders (ok)
61 million bytes in 412 hidden files (ok)
7.2 million KB in 80,615 user files, (say what?)
732 million bytes available (~same as DIR).

So, how do I find (and hopefully delete) the 63,000 files taking up
4.3 GB?

> So, how do I find (and hopefully delete) the 63,000 files taking up
> 4.3 GB?

Do you have System Restore enabled on your system? This has been
included with Window from WindowsME through XP, I believe. My guess
is that System Restore is taking up your harddrive space with files
that it could someday use to restore your computer in case of virus
damage, etc.

If System Restore is indeed your culprit (the files are in a hidden
folder "_Restore", I think), you could probably adjust some setting,
including how much space to use. Although it just occurred to me,
wouldn't you be able to see hidden folders in DOS, so then it would
count them in the file report? Well, check out the System Restore
thing if you have that on your PC.

Aaron

> Do you have System Restore enabled on your system? This has been
> included with Window from WindowsME through XP, I believe.

The OS is Windows 98 SE, so I think it predates the Microsoft System
Restore feature.

IIRC the computer (a Quantex) came with a 3rd party tool that was
supposed to function similarly to System Restore, but as I recall it
dumped its data to the D: drive (hence the extra partition when it
came from the factory). At any rate, that's been disabled (actually
uninstalled) for quite a while. If that is the issue, I should still
be able to find the files and delete them, shouldn't I? I think
that's how I cleaned out the D: drive a couple of years ago.

> Although it just occurred to me, wouldn't you be able to see hidden folders
> in DOS, so then it would count them in the file report?

It looks like the DIR /s /ah /a command does not include the hidden
directories beyond the current directory. The listing that I get when
I run it from C:\ does not include the hidden directories in
C:\WINDOWS, but when I run it from C:\WINDOWS, these hidden
directories do show up. I'll dig into that a bit more, but I don't
think that's the issue.

I'm really stumped here. I may have to resort to dumping my data to
that D: partition and reformatting C:, but I'd really hate to have to
go that far.

Any other thoughts?