After having issues with my old SSD Raid 0 which is 7x 32gb MTRON Pro SSD's with a ARC-1231ML controller, yes this Raid is on its last legs and being replaced with Intel SSD's, I was checking the Raid out with DiskDoctor and found an old friend called "! Lost & Found !" directory. From what I understand about this directory it is where Scandisk dumps files it finds durning a scan that have been repaired or broken etc. It is also a system directory that can not even be viewed when Show Hidden Folders/Files is turned on in Folder Options. The reason I am even asking this is this folder seems to be backed up with Acronis which I do a sector by sector incremental backup everyday of this Raid. This has served me well over time when bad things have happened to the Raid 0. Over time this folder has now grown to 16.9gb in size and on a SSD based system its nice to be able to free this space back up. I have tried hirens boot cd in Lunix and other programs and none seem to be able to see this folder. However programs like DiskDoctor and Active@Filerecovery can see this folder and I am able to recover files from inside this. 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. Does anyone have any ideas on how this folder can be emptied to free up space on SSD based systems ? Thanks for the help !

This seems to be a hard problem for some reason. I am just not having any luck finding any info on how to empty this folder, or even see it without using programs like Diskdoctor or Active@ I wonder why MS would have a folder that just grows and grows and you cannot empty it <shrug>

With seven drives, why are you using RAID 0 instead of RAID 5 or RAID 6? You do understand with RAID 0, your chances for volume failure increases with the number of configured disks. Nonetheless, open an administrative command prompt (right-click, Run as administrator), navigate to the folder and delete as necessary.

Thanks Darien. This is a Raid 0 for pure speed on my main rig. Yes I know all about Raid 0's, I am an extreme user, overclocker etc and we like fast systems :) As I said I do a Acronis sector by sector incremental backup everyday on this so if I ever have the need to recover from something like a disk goes out I just replace disk and reimage and boom back to running again. Its never really been an issue tho in the 6 years this Raid has been running. These are long past warrenty and MTRON is no more I think. To get the same speed with currect SSD's it only takes like 2-3 Intels now. I have done what you said many times, this directory just does not show up. From what I can tell its an active directory and might require some other way to empty this folder. This build was based on the MTRON Battleship seen here http://www.nextlevelhardware.com/storage/battleship/ In my rig it looked like this http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/15/img0340dx7.jpg/ Currently its running on a 3960x @ 4.8ghz system Thanks for your help tho.

Hi, I suggest you can try to Take Ownership of a File or Folder. Also test to delete the file in Safe Mode to check the result. Regards Vincent Wang TechNet Community Support

Thanks Vincent This is the main problem... Step #1: Open Windows Explorer, and then locate the file or folder you want to take ownership of. This folder does not show up even with hidden files turned on. File recovery programs see this folder just fine and can recover files out of it <shrug> Thanks all for the help but I think a fresh install is in order to just get rid of it plain and simple.

In another forum a person posted this and it sounds like what is happening so it looks like nothing to worry about. 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.