Windows 7: recycle bin may not be empty

I had 155gb on my hard drive and then added several .iso and video files, which reduced the hard drive to about 130gb..

Then I deleted all the iso and related video files and now there are only 144gb remaining on my hard drive, the equivalent to one movie.

How can I find and delete the ghost files that ought to have been removed via my recycle bin. I have restarted my computer and cleaned it with C Cleaner, to no avail.

Searching C drive by file size shown up nothing.

Had this issue once with XP and had to enter a special recycle bin folder (hidden) and delete it.
Can not find it in Windows 7. And believe me I tried, but am doing something wrong.




Please be very specific, as I require detailed instructions.

cordially,
Robert

This is my favorite "where the hell have my gigabytes gone" app.

Disk Space Fan - Manage disk space with art

Give it a run and see what it has to say.

Also, just for good measure, clean out your temp files and whatnot. I like CCleaner. Very fast and to the point.

CCleaner - Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

+1 ccleaner, i had a similar issue ccleaner fixed it and i regained about 50 GB
link

I am trying the Disk Space fan, (shows 148gb) and did clean out all temp folders. The amount of space available is now 148gb but should be about 155gb. Still one movie (about 7gb) is somewhere on my hard drive and it can not be seen as I deleted all the files I was aware of and when I search by file size nothing shows up. Baffled.

Thanks to all who responded.

Will advise.

Got my C drive up to 182GB, by using Disc Cleanup and following the available Windows 7 cleaners.

Disc Cleanup was the best aid.

Found this fix also which helped a lot:

Recycle Bin Corrupted - Cannot Delete File or Folder - Vista Forums

IMPORTANT: The following procedure permanently deletes all files and folders which are already in the Recycle Bin (from all user accounts in the system) and cannot be recovered.

1. Open an elevated Command Prompt window. To open an elevated Command Prompt, click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator.

2. Type the following command and press ENTER: rd /s /q C:\$Recycle.bin

(This clears out the $Recycle.bin folder from the C:\ partition. You may have to do this for each hard disk partition in your system.)

3. Type exit to close the Command Prompt window.

Now check if the issue still persists or not.

C drive up to 185 gb now.

Good to hear you got some space freed up. I might run the recycle bin command on my machine. I've thrown away a good 500gb of stuff over the course of my machine's life in just 4 weeks.