Res Ipsa Loquitur

Format. :-)

I was trying to avoid the F word.

Actually, the problem is the effing compression. Compression on hard drives is a BAD IDEA, and nothing good ever comes of it.

Turn it off, if possible. Though I suspect that this hard drive is rather tiny, is it not?

Scandisk? According to the instructions chkdsk doesn't do the same job. If that doesn't help, then consider the source, I've got Linux, and gave up MS at dos 6.1.

I don't remember what size the hard drive is Keith. It's 4+ yrs. old, so prolly not very big. I suspect it has a bad sector and she's going to have to just live with it. She won't be using it for anything except e-mail & internet anyway.

Scandisk, that's it. I knew there was something else I could try, but I couldn't remember what it was. (Can you tell I don't do this very often?) Thanks, Mike H. I'll give that a shot tonight.

Hello,
(I'm a Day-by-Day fan, that's how I ended up here.)
Are there compressed files on the hard drive which are being managed by Windows? As somebody has noted above, compressing is a bad idea (but I'm guessing you are trying to conserve space.) Anyhow, here is what I would advice. Double-click on "My Computer", right click on the drive you need to take care of, select Properties, click on the Tools tab, under Error Checking click on Check Now, click on both checkboxes and click on Start. If this is your boot disk, it will diplay a long message which pretty much says that the operation will start after you reboot. And when you reboot, it will. Do this in the evening because this type of low-level intense checkdisk takes hours. Quite literally hours. If the disk has bad sectors they will be marked as such, imdexes and stuff will be refreshed, etc - all good stuff. I do that every week on my laptop. Then you can run a defrag and speed things up in general. Hope this takes care of things. Good luck.

"any suggestions"

Yeah, use linux.

http://www.novell.com/linux/suse/

:D

-ron

The fact that the hard drive has only 20% free space isn't reassuring. You may have to delete some files-- oftentimes disk utilities need "elbow room" to work, and the 20% of the disk that's free may not be enough.

My two cents' worth.

Thanks, nms, I've tried that and it didn't help.

Ron, all I can tell you is that for me & my house, we use Microsoft. ;-)

Hale, we've deleted about all the files we can. But I think you're right, not enough free space may be part of the problem.

It runs fine like it is, fine enough anyway. I was just wondering if I'd missed something.