Windows XP insists the HDD is full

[Nuclear Krusader]

So, I had this laptop with a 30 GB HDD which had only 124Kb of free space left. Windows was so slow until it finally refused to boot. So, I took the HDD out, plugged it to my bench machine and deleted files till I freed about 9 GB in the HDD.

But now, upon putting it back into the laptop, Windows still complains of very low disk space and prompts to use the Disk Cleanup. What is most vexingly puzzling is that pulling up the Disk's Properties, Windows still reports the HDD as completely full, even though the machine runs fast enough now. Where are my "hidden" 9 GB of free space?

[Nuclear Krusader]

Ran chkdsk at the recovery console and this is what it said:

The volume appears to contain one or more unrecoverable problems

Tried then DIR and it didn't list anything, it just said: An error ocurred during directory enumeration

Help!

[glc]

Either the file system is hopelessly scrambled and/or the drive is in the midst of a massive failure. Run some diags on the drive.

[Chris in U.K.]

Hi Nuke,

I had a similar problem years ago on my boss's machine, complicated by the fact that she had very bad housekeeping in terms of directory structure etc.

So like you I removed the drive and installed it as a secondary in another machine, and I was then able to defrag and stuff by using the OS of the host machine.

If it's rilly bad I guess you could move all the user files to the host drive, defrag the remainder and then start re-importing.

Sorry if blindingly obvious,

Chris.