One of my partitions is totally filled. Can I access it?

Zoomer

I don't know how this happened. But it seems that one of my logical partitions got filled up with data completely. Possibly due to one of my family members. Anyways, the whole hard drive isn't full, but I cannot access any data in the partition to delete it. The partition, which was named "D:\Downloads" now says "D:\Local Disk". Everytime I try to access it, the PC freezes then goes back to normal but I can't access the data!

I have like 9 gigs of unallocated space on the hard drive. Could I combine it somehow with the maxed out partition? I can't do anything with it right now and I have some data on there that is really important. Can anyone help? Is there any program out there that can access this? Windows disk management can't get in it and neither can partition magic. The only option is to format and I do not want to do that.

RussS

Have you tried booting to your XP CD and then using the recover console? Change directory to that partition and delete something - that should allow access. Unless of course the reason for lack of access is that partition is screwed.

sprkymrk

It sounds like the hard drive is going bad. A bad partition/drive will many times show 0MB free space, but the disk isn't full, it's just bad. Try the XP CD recovery console as suggested, but once there try a "chkdsk c: /R /V /X", replace C: with your drive/volume that is hosed.

Ricka182

I also recco the recovery console. You could also try duping the disk to save the data....

paige1

I once moved a whole partition to a larger drive using imaging software (Power Quest's Drive Image). I hear that the same can be accomplished with Norton's "Ghost".

rbutturini

You can use partition magic too, to reallocate your total space if necessary (I think Symantec owns this now?). It sounds to me though like the partition may have errors on it, in which case you can use the recovery console as reccomended above to chkdsk it.