Thanks filmy,

Probably not the issue as the drive is only 120G. Maybe I'll try copying the entire drive to an internal drive and see if the files become visible.

Have you tried the show hidden files option.

If you are running XP go to my computer, hi-lite the drive. Next choose tools folder options. Choose the view tab. Then check the show hidden files and folders.

Thanks Orcatek,

Tried that also, still no files. Ran Norton on that drive and it completed in about 15 seconds, certainly not enough to scan 39G of files, so I decided it was a fluke and reformatted the drive - got all the space back.

One of those strange occurances in the land of WinTel I guess.

RalphM

To keep this from happening again, I strongly suggest you right-click on "My Computer," click on "Properties" and then click on "System Restore." Make sure that under "Available Drives" that your external hard disk shows "Turned Off." If it instead shows "Monitoring" Windows will add all sorts of files to your hard disk as you add and delete files. It also slows things down, usually not to the point of dropping frames, but you never know. For a data drive, my recommendation is to turn this off.

Also, if it happens again, right-click on the drive in Explorer, choose Properties, then the Tools tab and then click on Check Now to perform error checking on the drive. You might very well have ended up with all sorts of lost clusters, which would not show up at all in any file manger, even with hidden files shown. This in turn is caused by disconnecting the external drive without FIRST clicking on the disable icon in the system tray (next to your clock in the lower right corner). Don't ever do that, or you'll end up with exactly the situation you describe. You can always re-format, as you did, but sometimes that is not a very practical solution, if you have a lot of data on the drive that you don't want to temporarily offload and then re-load.

Thanks johnmeyer,

If you will indulge me another off topic question, often when I try to unplug an external drive, I get the message that it cannot be stopped right now - try again later. This sometimes goes on for a long time even though no application should be accessing the drive.

What would be happening here? BTW, these external drives travel between XP machines and one running Windows 2000.

Thanks,
RalphM

often when I try to unplug an external drive, I get the message that it cannot be stopped right now - try again later

Good. This means you are trying to shut down properly. I get this message all the time, and usually if I try again right away, I get the "all clear" message that it's OK to disconnect. If I keep getting the message, then there is usually some application that has "locked" a file on the removable drive. Sometimes this can be nothing more than Windows Explorer. Almost always, if I shut down all applications (a pain, I'll admit), I can then "legally" disconnect the drive (i.e., disconnect without disobeying the warning message).

Again, what is usually happening is that some application, which is still running, has opened a file on that removable drive, but hasn't yet explicitly closed it. Even if nothing is actively being done with this file (no reads or writes for a long time), until that application closes that file, its status is in limbo. With the older FAT and FAT32 file systems, you would definitely get lost file clusters if you disconnected at this point. I never got as familiar with NTFS (the file system in Win 2000 and XP, the two you use), so I cannot say with as much certainty whether bad things will happen if the file is open, but no writing is actively taking place. My guess, however, is that if you never unplug the drive until told to do so that you won't have a repeat of your "lost" disk space problem that was the original topic of this thread.

Hope that helps.