(The alliteration was completely unintentional…but catchy)
So I was installing something on my computer last night when I noticed I only had about 70MB left on my hard drive…my 40GB hard drive, so I went and looked to see what was taking up so much space. Finally I realized that everything was in the FTP server directory…apparently some script kiddies got in and uploaded their files and such. Well, I’ve deleted everything I can, but there’s still 10GB worth of file fragments left. I’ve defragged using the Window’s app, and also a third party app, but still have had no luck. Is there anything I can do, short of formating, to fix this problem?
Seriously, the file fragments may be ASCII (text) files or binary files. Unless you have the time, inclination and the correct tools to splice together the files, I suggest you:
Burn the file fragments to CDs, reformat and move on.
You say you’ve run defrag, and that’s fine. But for what you’re trying to do, shouldn’t you be running a SCANDISK type tool?
SCANDISK and it’s descendants will FIND lost fragments and convert them to files, which you can then DELETE. Defragging just consolidates your files and files fragments.
In WinXP (my current OS) you might wanna’ try Right-Clicking C drive, then going to tools, then hitting “Check Now” under Error Checking.
What file system are you using? NTFS should be better able to allocate smaller cluster sizes.
Slack space isn’t corrected by a defrag. If you have huge cluster sizes (AKA FAT) you can either FDISK a small partition for small files (partition magic will do this on the fly) or as Duckster mentioned, burn it to a CD and delete the files.
I’ve run scandisk, and it doesn’t help either. I’m using NTFS file system.
No, I’m not talking about Slack space
I’m fairly sure that there’s only parts of files on the hard drive, so assembling them wouldn’t do much good. All I want to do is delete the parts of files that the script kiddie(s) put on my computer, but when I try to, it says “Cannot delete file: cannot read from the source file or disk”
You’re not making much sense - if there are entries in the filesystem that you can select for deleting… that’s a file. Why do you think they’re “fragments”?
As to why you can’t delete it… do any of these files have odd characters in them? Higher Ascii, double periods, etc etc?
Actually, your situation sounds alot like this one (and this one).
Their solutions:
Run “DIR /X /A” to get the 8.3 filename of the file(s) in question
Use standard del/rd/rmdir commands to delete the files.