[terriblepaulz]

I have a 500 GB Seagate external HD that I used solely to store music files that were served from a dedicated laptop music server.  I was having some problems with iTunes being unable to find certain tracks.  After the 6th or 7th such incident, I got the bright idea that I would simply re-load all my music files, which I keep archived on a separate external HD.  After deleting all the music files, Windows Explorer shows about 76 GB of used disc space, which leaves me just short of having sufficient space for my library (Explorer says there is about 465 GB available with 389 free - my library is about about 425 GB).  I have de-fragged and used the Windows disc clean-up utility but those 76 phantom GB remain.
 
The drive is getting a little long in the tooth, as I have used it for probably 4.5 years.  Is this just what happens when hard drives fail?  Is there a freeware utility I should try?  Any help would be appreciated.   

 

[jenneth]

It doesn't sound like a drive failure. Did you empty your Recycle Bin?

 

[terriblepaulz]

Quote:

It doesn't sound like a drive failure. Did you empty your Recycle Bin?

Yeah, tried that.  That's part of the Disk Cleanup process.  That did reduce the amount of "phantom" data, from about 105 GB to the present 76 GB.

 

[jenneth]

If that's the case, then either there's a hidden folder somewhere in the drive, or like you said, your drive could be dying. Check your Event Viewer to see if you're getting any disk read errors.

 

[bcg27]

You can change your folder settings to not hide 'hidden' folders which should show you if there is anything hiding there. If you have a linux machine you can plug it into opening it up in nautilus and pressing ctrl+h shows hidden files/folders. You should be able to check the SMART attributes to see if there are bad sectors that are no longer available for use. If there is nothing on the drive you care about you can re format the drive, which should give you all of your space back.