Problem With Portable Hard Drive

[da1daonlyone]

Okay, so i took an old laptop hard drive which i used and now i encased it so i can use it as a portable one. I deleted various things and now i cant recover the space. I deleted gigs of stuff but it shows only a half a gig. The hard drive has important information of it so i can't reformat it. How do i get the space back?

[willy]

Recycle Bin maybe ?

[da1daonlyone]

where is the recycle bin? i can't find it on the hard drive. i enabled hidden files but still couldn't see it

[board123]

I think Disk Cleanup can see it.

I suggest you copy whatever you need off the drive and format it, then put the files back on there.

[da1daonlyone]

i used disk clean up and deleted the files in the recycling bin. got the some space but not a lot already. at the last resort i want to format it as there is a lot of info. any ideas?

[GVRtrader]

Considering you used the drive before as a primary windows drive, its generally a good idea to format (and deleting all the windows file) before you even use it as a 2nd drive. I advice you track down all the important files and then format it. Also if the files are so important, you might want to burn them into DVD/CD/BlueRays as well.

[Amourek]

Try using SpaceMonger. It'll tell you exactly what/where is using up the space.

[da1daonlyone]

Thank you that was a excellent program. i was able to find the hidden recycling bin folders which i was able to delete and free up the space when i emptied my computers recycling bin . I will have to delete the windows files eventually