Wow did I ever have fun with the recycler folder files. I happened to look in a folder that my antivirus program told me had legal software that could be used to take over my computer. I found files going back to 1996 I kid you not. There was nearly 4 gig of stuff in there. It wasn't on a disk that had ever had an OS on it that I know of. It certainly wasn't a drive that was that old. I could not figure how files that old could still be floating around on my computer. So being the idjit jump in with both feet kinda guy I am I calmly deleted every file in a sub-folder of the recycler folder. I wanted to make sure no pointers were still pointing there from my recycle bin so I deleted everything in there too. Then my computer hung up trying to empty the recycle bin. Then I had to reboot. Then my hard drive totally disappeared from the computer. I mean it didn't even show up in the disk management section of the administrative tools / computer management section. Nothing I did would bring back that disk. Not only that but 2 other drives also disappeared at the same time. I went from 5 hard drives to 2. I tried all the simple stuff like rebooting without the drives hooked up then rebooting again with one at a time hooked back up. Nothing. I went to system restore and it told me all changes done to my hard drives would be lost since they were removed from the system backup facility. Now how do I undo that. After an hour of banging my head on my computer and trying every sane option I could think of I went ahead with the system restore. What's the worst that could happen? Yeah right. But I had my really important files backed up to a USB drive that was turned off so I felt fairly safe. I still didn't want a 2 week battle to restore everything though. So half way through my system restore the computer hangs up. Sheesh what next. More head banging first. Then I rebooted the computer with no hard drives hooked up but my OS drive. It finally came back online and it even told me my system restore had finished. It also told me it had found new hardware and was installing the drivers. Hmmm... My hard drives weren't even connected. How did that happen? So I let it reboot then I shut it down and hook my drives back up and they were actually back again only with different drive letters. Also I had recently migrated my OS and partitions to a new drive because my old one was getting iffy. The system restore was trying to totally rebuild that drive from who knows where? It had a lot of system files back on that drive and it was totally blank when this all started. Ah computers. You gotta hate 'em. The moral of the story - if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have 2 terrabytes of space plus on my computer. Why worry about a few gig here and there? Trust me I won't be doing that again in the near future. I still can't figure why it had files dating back to 1996. That's just crazy. I've been through countless hard drives since then. Heck I was using Win 3.1 in 1996. I'm always a slow adapter of new OS's. I'm still running XP for example. How in the heck it kept those files from that far back through at least half a dozen hard drive swaps and several OS changes I just have no clue. Computers. You hate them but you hate them too. Too bad they're so dang useful. I almost used mine for target practice today. I'll stop venting now. Anyone else have a problem? I've actually been a computer trouble shooter since the mid-90's. I cut my teeth on an original Mac. I've built computers, sold computers, repaired computers, taught computer classes, used computers for several business ventures and made a lot of money with them over the years. I had one contract for 10 years to do desktop publishing. You young guys won't remember what that is most likely. It was a long while back.
