Drive Cleaner

[planecrazy.eu]

Hey

I have tried this term in Google, and others, and came up with nothing of any use.

I have a 500GB HDD, 70% of it is used, which i recon has around 15% of stuff that doesnt work, ie, temps and corrupt files.

Is there a program out there that can

- Find corrupt files
- Find Temp Files/Folders
- Find Empty Folders

And the ability to find know junk would be helpful.

What i have done, is i make backup each time i reboot my machine, which thanks to windows is a quarterly choir, and now i have no need for some of the files, but there is so much junk i cant find what i want out of what i dont want because of some program i used that decided it would be good to move all group extensions to a folder, however i appear to have thousands of .doc files and even more folders, just in a list.

So what i need to do, is extract the good from the bad.

Software is needed, however, i dont think it would exist for this problem, but the bulleted list should help me out.

Thanks...

[hellsbrink]

You could try this

http://www.download.com/WinASO-Disk-Cleaner/3000-2086_4-10403400.html?tag=lst-4

[gas path]

Or this: http://filehippo.com/download_ccleaner/
Make sure to tick all the boxes.

[Saab Dastard]

Lots of programs out there - try google:

"utility Find Empty Folders"

SD

[Diedtrying]

I use the following.

http://www.ccleaner.com/

and this

http://www.lavasoftusa.com/products/ad_aware_free.php

[planecrazy.eu]

Right then...

First of all, thanks for the above, with the aid of another tool i found, i got shot of more or less 17GB, mostly duplicate items or temps....

Bad news...

It was a 500GB partition, or showing 465 or something, so i decided that i will shrink the drive to 400 and use 65GB to install Fedora...

Problem is, i forgot to plug my laptop in, it ran out of battery half way through, now i can access the drive...

I have found a few tools for data recovery, they are just trials, but i dont have 350GB of space to back-up too. The one that works the best charges per recovered data, unless you buy the pro, which is like £380.

So, any ideas, suggestions?

I have tried a few partition repair tools, but they just seem to be data recovery tools, so, are there any true partition recovery tools?

I am using Norton Partition Magic, thats what cut out half way through. Now i just get the option to delete partition.

Thanks again...

[Saab Dastard]

Re-partition from scratch, load whatever OS (s) you want and restore data from backups. Life is too short!

You have got backups, haven't you? Please say you didn't start out on all this crap-cleaning and re-partitioning without taking the elementary precaution of backing up your data?

Salutary lesson time.

SD

[gibbo568]

I don't know if this will help, but there is a bootable CD-ROM version of Linux, for system repair and recovery. It is SystemRescueCD, available from www.sysresccd.org, it is listed on the Distrowatch website.
Please note that I have not used this personally, so I can not vouch for its effectivness!
I do however, use PCLinuxOS as my main OS, and have used the live cd version for fault diagnosis on Linux and Win systems.

Hope you get your data back!

[planecrazy.eu]

Nope, no backups...

I have made the biggest mistake, as the HDD was my backup of everything, i sync my pc with it, move stuff there when i need to archive, and i had this great idea to see if ihad duplicates and temps on the drive...

Well, now i am dataless =(

Own fault entirely, in more than one way...

As far as i can see, the data is still there, its the partition that is damaged, many of these restore data programs can get it back, i have tried them all on trials, but the best ones that find it all are expensive...

And another problem is, i dont have like 350GB of free HDD space any place...

Still not found the solution to this, as XP cant detect the partition, however partition magic can and selected data restorers...

Think an important lesson has been learnt here, a very important one...

I forgot about using linux to get the data back, or try, I will try my Fedora VMWARE installation first, then that disc. Dont hold much hope for Fedora as the host cant see the HDD, so doubt the guest will...

[hellsbrink]

Boot from XP CD, select "recovery console" and try the "fixmbr" command. If the master boot record for the partition has gone pear shaped, then that should get it working