How to empty the "! Lost & Found !" directory

[Buckeye]

Warning long story

After a very long period of running these old MTRON's in Raid 0 on a ARC-1231ML the time has come to replace this old dinosaur.

I had a total of 9 32gb MTRON PRO's and used 7 in a Raid 0, this left me 2 spares which I used from time to time on bench setups and other things. Over time drives have died and MTRON became non responsive in RMA emails, I think I RMA'd a total of 6 drives, yes there track record was not very good. So the last spare died not all that long ago so I have no backup SSD's anymore for this beast.

The Raid has been acting up for some time and I knew this day would come at some point. Acronis has been given me issues with backups on this Raid, it has slown down a lot over time. If I look at the ARC-1231ML event logs I see a fair amount of read errors that happen often.

So I have ordered 2 Intel 520 Series Cherryville 120gb drives to replace the MTRONs for now. Plan is to get 2 more for a total of 4 Intels in Raid 0 and would like to replace the Raid card with a newer model. I have to research which card to get, I can't remember the model but it has a fast path key to increase speed... anyway I have time for all that.

The problem with the MTRON Raid 0 is I get errors in Acronis that point a sector/s that appear to have gone bad. Event viewer says Drive 7 is giving read errors. Scan disk and a whole bunch of other things have not been able to clear this. I am not sure if I break the Raid in ARC BIOS and recreate it will fix anything. I doubt it tho., with the track record of these MTRONs its most likely drive 7 is going out.

But back to my question....

While looking at the Raid to see what is going on I ran Disk Doctor on it. While doing this I found that old friend "! Lost & Found !" directory.

I had been away on a business trip last week in New York installing servers at Equinix NY4 in Secaucus, NJ. What a place that is... Its Huge ! My client now has the fastest servers in all of NY4

When I came back and fired up the main rig I was greeted with Big Red Letters on ARC-1231ML start up... Raid Errors and could not start. I did get it going by reseating all the cables, not sure what happened while I was away LOL. On starting windows it went into a scan disk and found tons of errors which it recovered. I ended up doing a Arconis restore of an image I had made just before I left. All was good except for a few updates and bam, back in operation.

I have set Arconis to do a Sector by Sector Incremental backup everyday at 11am which has served me well over time. But I think this "! Lost & Found !" directory has been around for sometime and I just noticed it.

I believe that files in this directory can be deleted, its 16gb in size so I would like to be able to free this space up.

The "! Lost & Found !" directory does not show up in the Arconis backups when I open a stored image. Maybe it can be cleaned out of that and a simple restore and all would be good.

Or do I need to find a bootable media that I can then open my C: drive and delete this stuff manually.
I tried hirens boot cd but it had nothing that could see it.

Any ideas on this ?

I really do need to do a fresh install of Windows 7 as I have had just to much crap on this system for far to long but I would like to know how to clean this "! Lost & Found !" directory just incase I run into this again.

Thanks

Found.JPG

[NEOAethyr]

Look inside the lost and found folder and see what's in it.
If it's junk del it...

The found.000 can be del'ed, it's trash from scandisk.
Unless you recently lost something of importance on that drive, like a config file in txt format...

$Recycle.Bin can be del'ed, it'll clear it out and it'll still work (folder will come back too).
$Extend I have no clue, you using gpt instead of mbr maybe?

$WINDOWS.~BT
... this looks like and older copy of windows...
If it is, and you no longer boot it to the side as a 2nd os, then del it.

Intel, probably driver installer left over junk not cleaned up.
Check 1st before del'ing, could be part of some cpl or taskbar thing or something.

Config.msi.
Installer/uninstaller entry (add/remove programs cpl) stuff from the current windows install.
Know that if you install a game on a previous windows install, and if it still works on the next windows install sort of thign wihtout reinstalling the game...
Then it will no longer have an installer/uninstaller entry anyways.
If you wanna del it, go ahead.
If you wanna try to uninstall something before that, you should doit.
Otherwise just leave the folder be.

Hold shift key down while right clicking a dir, left click on the del command and then you can let go of the shift key.
For quicker del'ing of large dir's.
Bypasses recyclebin.

[Buckeye]

Hey NEO, I figured you might know something about this

The problem is this folder does not show up by normal means. They only way I have been able to see it is with DiskDoctor or Active@Filerecovery and both show a lot of files inside. I can even recover files from inside this. It has a ton of directorys with files inside each one. So I am unable to delete anything inside it.

I have tried hirens boot cd in Lunix and other programs on that disk but none are able to even see this folder.

The obvious answer is to do a fresh install which I do plan on when the new SSD's arrive in a few days. This current install has been running for a very long time and a fresh install is needed anyway. So this question is really for research purposes and to be able to get a handle on it for the new fresh install.

[Buckeye]

Download and run active@filerecovery and I am sure you will see this folder also.
http://www.file-recovery.com/

It is a system directory that can not even be viewed when Show Hidden Folders/Files is turned on in Folder Options.

[NEOAethyr]

I know of 2 ways supposedly to hide files/folders.

The 1st one was definitely using an extended type acsii name for it.
I don't remember the details other then using the alt key to punch in ext acsii, and the created file/folder disappearing in front of me.
It's Similar to this but it used to disappear some how or another, don't think it even works anymore:
http://www.dreamincode.net/forums/to...i-mean-hidden/

Another one was a script I saw in ahk.
This link is new to me:
http://www.autohotkey.com/community/...ic.php?t=85398
http://www.autohotkey.com/community/...ic.php?t=65131

I can't find the page I saw a while back.
I think it was either something to do with making a file but not filling out the whole file table entry for it or something.
Or it was another type of invalid name/entry thing.
I found it around the time I found the hyde script.
http://www.autohotkey.com/community/...hp?f=2&t=84413

Making a file or folder named with any of these char's \\/:*?"<>| would probably make it hard to access too.

Winhex might beable to doit.
But it doesn't work well on exfat/fat64, the dir browser crashes and has always done so on that type of fs .
Winhex is expensive too... if you don't already have it no point in wasting money on it .

Sorry I don't have more info for ya, I just don't feel like dl'ing that app and messing with it right now .

Edit:
I'm thinking it's the !'s in the folder name that prevents you from opening it.
I bet you can map it to a virtual drive in dos/cmd window and then acces the drive letter in explorer.
Pretty sure one of the links I just posted explained how .

The "Secret/Hidden" folder can be accessed easily via 7zip File Manager, FreeCommander but not with CubicExplorer.
With 7zFM, you can rename the folder easily and so access it.

[[XC] Lead Head]

I'm quite sure the reason you can't delete it is because it's not really a real folder. Everything inside that folder is already deleted.

When you "delete" something in windows, the files are physically still there, the file name and path to the files are removed however. It would take way too long if every file you deleted had zeros written in its place. The pathless files just sit there until they are eventually overwritten. File recovery programs can "see" those deletes files, and they just put them into a convenient "Folder" for you. The files still reside on the drive, but do not actually take up any available space. Unless you happened to do a sector by sector backup.

[Buckeye]

That sounds very possible Lead and makes sense actually.
They seem to be Virtual folders and files so...

Its hard to tell if it is actually taking up space when you can't empty it tho LOL
That is what I have been doing also is a sector by sector backup so all that junk is being carried over.

Thanks all for your help

New SSD's coming today and it will be fresh install time.