I had a 250 gb HD for OS and programs and an isolated 750 gb HD where I stored my personal data (music, games, videos, images, whatever) which summed up to no more than 600 gb.
Recently I purchased a new HD, 1.5 tb, so I started rearranging stuff.
First thing I did was (after formating the new disk) copy my personal files from the 750 HD to the new 1.5 HD.
Since I wanted to keep the same creation and modification dates in every file and wasn´t really sure that XP did that, I started googling around and heard nice things about Microsofts SyncToy, so I used it to clone the huge folder where I keep all my things into the new HD (took all night).*
After the copy process I destroyed the Sync between the twins folders to avoid possible future problems, and since there was no point to it anyway.
Everything was perfect up to here.
Here is when things got strange, but I did not realize until much later.
So I destroyed the partition in my old 750 HD and copied the OS/programs partition to the 750 HD from the original 250 HD OS/programs partition, which I also deleted afterwards.
Only just then I realized that the new 1.5 HD, according to XP, was 1 tb full.
... what?!
First I thought it was because the new drive was not compressed by XP, so I checked the compression box in drive properties (which took another good couple of hours) to see what happened. If there was a difference, it certainly wasn´t the huge, almost 400 gb worth of space I was missing. Clearly, that wasn´t it.
I rechecked the size of the main folder where I keep everything, just in case, and it´s about 587 gb.
So I started researching what was wrong, and I found SpaceMonger (which I loved, by the way), who very generously pointed out to me that 26.7% (374.1 gbs) of my HD was "unscannable", and somehow, used.
On my investigation I tried everything I read off:
-Looked for hidden folders in the HD, like recycler (cleaned it), system volume information (cleaned it), etc.
-Dealt with XP system restore points (disabled them).
-Checked for alternate data streams by means of SysInternals "Streams" (found very few, mostly xp thumbnail files, really insignificant, but killed them too just in case).
-Chkdsk /f on boot (it did fix something, but not the real issue)
I haven´t really worried about rootkits since I use XP 64-bits sp2 OS and ESET Smart Security, which I consider (bugs aside) quite trustworthy. Besides, I couldn´t run RootkitRevealer in XP 64, apparently it is not 64-bit compatible.
I´ve been reading the forum trying to find some similar case, but I had no real luck (though it helped me greatly during my previous tries).
I really don´t know what else to do, and 374 gbs lost in some obscure, ethereal abyss is just not funny.
Here are some pics, trying to show what is going on.
If you are wondering about the weird screenshots, I use two different monitors in dualview.
If you are wondering about my drives, here is a brief description:
3 HDs
4 Partitions
Disk 1 (250 gb):
Partition 1 (Logical): Thanatos (E:) [XP 32]
Disk 2 (750 gb):
Partition 1 (Primary): Fobos (C:) [XP 64]
Partition 2 (Logical): Hypnos (D:) [was intending to install Vista 64 here to give it a try, but haven´t done that yet]
Disk 3 (1.5 tb):
Partition 1 (Logical): Deimos (F:) [no OS, just files]
I use dual-boot between XP 64 and XP 32 (XP 64 is default) and all partitions are NTFS.
If there is anything you can think of, or maybe something I missed trying, please tell me.
Thank you very much!
*I also considered that using SyncToy without full knowledge of how it actually works may have been a horrible idea to begin with, and I confess I am a bit suspicious about it, but truth is I don´t and can´t really know for sure.
