Where are these files?

January 9, 2011 7:35 PM

Files from a previous install of Windows 7 seem to be between worlds - they are taking up space on my hard disk, but I can't see them in the file explorer? How can I get them to show up?

After noticing I was running strangely low on disk space, I ran SpaceSniffer to find out what was eating my hard drive. It turns out a ton of old tv shows/movies/music from a previous Windows install are still on my hard drive, but not showing up in explorer. I can still play these files if I access them through SpaceSniffer.

I'm still on Windows 7. Is there a way to get them to show up in explorer? Or is this glitch beyond salvage?

posted by pilibeen to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: OK, wasted question. After a closer look, all the files were in the folder Windows.old, on my c: drive. Apparently Windows 7 made a backup at some point without my knowing?
posted by pilibeen at 7:40 PM on January 9, 2011

It did that when you installed the new version of Windows.
posted by Xany at 8:10 PM on January 9, 2011

(Sorry, realised that might not be helpful.) You can delete the Windows.old folder without it affecting your current Windows installation. Just make sure you don't actually want anything in it before you do so, as one should always do before deleting something.
posted by Xany at 9:34 PM on January 9, 2011

I had w weird problem where .iso files made with DVDShrink just weren't showing up when they were made in the root directory, but they showed up in WinDirStat. I can't remember how I ended up deleting them (3rd party software) but after telling DVDShrink to put temporary files in a folder, I could see and manipulate them.

There's *something* amiss with the Win7 filesystem, but not something that I could ever google up.

And this is with a Win7 install where I turned off every stupid thing I could find (and after doing so, I actually kinda LIKE Win7).
posted by porpoise at 11:23 PM on January 9, 2011