Hard Drive not showing all free space

Hi,

I've got two 160 GB SATA hard drives. One is partitioned into a 147GB
partition for backups and a 2GB partition I use as a scratch disk for
Photoshop.

The backup partition had two copies of the My Documents folder, both around
40GB. I deleted one and Windows Explorer now shows just the one 43.7GB
folder and nothing else.

However Properties for that drive/partition shows the Used Space as 80GB and
the Free Space as 63GB with a Capacity of 147GB.

Computer Management shows the same and also shows the drive as "Healthy
(Page File)". It won't let me delete the partition or format it - they're
both greyed out.

Where has my free space gone? How can I get it back? Will reinstalling
Windows correct it? I was going to do this anyway.

Many thanks for any words of wisdom as I'm stuck.

Derek.

 

Only a long shot - but...

Have you accidentally drag-and-dropped one of the My Document folders into
the other one? This would give the impression than you have deleted one of
the two folders and explain why no space has been released..

 

Hi,

Thanks for the suggestion, but no I haven't done that. If I had, the My Docs
folder I can see would now be around twice the size that it used to be and
its still 43.7GB.

It'll probably go down as one of life's mysteries.

Thanks anyway,

Derek.