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General discussion

My USB Driv has 2GB of invisible files

Feb 22, 2005 11:14PM PST

I tried to remove all files from my 30GB USB drive.
Then it reported 8+/- GB still in use.
I checked Show Hidden Files, Show System Files, etc., but nothing showed in Explorer. Finally I tried Disk cleanup. I showed 0 to be gained by emptying the recycle bin; yet when I chose View files, I found about 3 GB lurking in there...deleted them. Now 5 GB hiding somewhere. I tried DskChk and found 3GB of fragments. Now 2GB and out of ideas.
How can I find those files?. Does the USB drive need any stored files to function?

Discussion is locked

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Another idea
Feb 23, 2005 8:49AM PST

Do you really want to remove all files? If so, just reformat the drive and see what it's capacity shows after that.

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2GB of invisible
Feb 23, 2005 10:25AM PST

Thanx for the idea. My concern is that some of those files might be needed for the drive to register/interact with a system I mount it on. I'm reluctant to format till I get more scoop.
Also, I'm curious as to how files won't show in Explorer etc but do get listed during a defrag operation. They all had designations like A004xxxx.ext
whrere xxxx was like 9800down to 4000 and ext was like dll,exe,cnt, .....