How can I recover lost Folders?

How can I recover lost hdd space? I lost almost 120 GB out of 250...?

• Hello ! I have a 250 GBytes Sata Hdd and recently I experienced the following thing: I realised that on my second partition (i jave 2 partitions C-for windows Xp, and D - for other things like music, games and movies) i had 6 or 7 directories which all contained the same thing: a few files and folders and an exe file called hotFix. I tried to delete these folders but access was denied. So i formated drive C , reinstalled windows and tried to delete them again, but to no avail. The same problem: the access was denied. I deleted both partitions, and, to my surprise, the total hdd space that resulted afterwards was 130 GBS out of 250. Is there any way I can recover my lost hdd space? Thanks

• Answer:

  Fdisk the partitions. This will delete everything. After you Fdisk make sure yo turn off the computer - don't just restart as the procedure will not take affect effectively. Turn of...wait 10 seconds before you turn on again. The same applies to formatting. Format doesn't completely delete. HotFix is a Windows Update. if you mange to delete it somehow, Windows may not work anymore or functionality will be impaired. 250 gb may not necessarily be 250 gb. If it is not divisible by 1024 evenly then the remainder will be unusable space. They say 250gb in case you use linux or unix or some such but even these OS steal space for their virtual memory.