C:/RECYCLER ?

thefadedline

Hi all.

Using SequoiaView, I found a folder (C:/RECYCLER) taking up around 5gb of space that seems to contain nothing but MP3's from my illegal-downloading days :thumbsdow.

Trouble is, when I go into the folder, there's nothing there. I've tried showing hidden files/folders and vice versa. All I wanna do is delete the folder's contents. I can't even delete the actual folder either because it doesn't appear on the C: drive with hidden files/folders shown or not. When I right-click and go into folder properties, the check box for 'Hidden' is ticked but greyed-out and unclickable.

There's probably a blindingly obvious way to do it that I'm not seeing!

Cheers,
Matt.

Thrax

If you have the recycle bin icon on your desktop, you can just right click it and hit "empty."

thefadedline

My recycle bin is empty. I know that /RECYCLER is the bin, but these files are further into the folder somehow. The physical location of them is:

C:\RECYCLER\S-1-5-21-583907252-329068152-1801674531-500\Dc148

The yellow square is this folder, each tiny grey square in that is an MP3 file. As you can see, it's taking up quite a chunk of C:.

Leonardo

XP? Vista? Windows 95? (just kidding)

Do you log on to Windows with a password? Is there more than one account? If there is an administrator account, log on to that and try (whether or not it has a logon password).

You could also try the operation in Safe Mode.

We'll go from there if those two solutions aren't solutions.

thefadedline

I did have my specs in my signature but the format's obviously changed since I was last here. I'll get on that.

I am on XP and there's just the one administrator account that isn't password-protected.

Leonardo

Try from Administrator and then try from Safe Mode.

thefadedline

I don't know what's happened but these files aren't showing up in SequoiaView anymore... I haven't changed a thing.

Linc

I'm not familiar with Sequoia, but maybe it was registering the MP3s despite them not actually taking up disk space. When Windows "deletes" something, it actually just marks it with a flag that says "you can overwrite this space when you need it"; it doesn't actively remove the data. Maybe Sequoia was still seeing the data even though it was "deleted".

Really-really deleting something requires more effort than it's typically worth. Unless you find yourself 5GB short of storage space that you needed, I wouldn't worry about it anyway.

If you want to find all the old junk on your computer and nuke it, grab CCleaner. I just used that on my work computer and it freed a LOT of space :o I don't keep a tidy workstation I'm afraid

QCH

First of all.. The Recycler directory is hidden and a system directory. You would need to open "My Computer" then click on the "Tools" menu then "Folder Options". Next click on the second tab marked "View". Make sure the radio button is selected for "Show Hidden files and folders" and the check box is UNCHECKED for "Hide protected operating system files". Click the "OK" button.

Now that you still have the "My Computer" window open, select the "C:/" drive and then open the "Recycler" directory. Delete all the files in there except the latest one (today's date... if more than one is listed for today, delete all but the one that has the latest time stamp.).

That will clear up ALL items from past deletions that never really got purged. I've seen empty recycling bins that show up empty but the Recycler have dates from years ago.