Recycle Bin malfunction has lead to missing hard drive space

[Ryan-D]

Hi,

I'm using an external hard drive for all of my media storage.

Today I deleted an 8gb folder from it, and when I went to empty the Recycle Bin, nothing happened.

I opened it up and tried to restore the folder, thinking I'll try again, but nothing happened.
I went through the System settings and tried emptying it from there, and again, nothing happened!

Eventually I unplugged the drive then plugged it in again. The recycle bin was finally empty, but the space hadn't been reclaimed on the drive, and the folder's nowhere to be found.

I've tried scanning the drive, defragging it, disk cleanup and chkdsk and nothing's worked so far...

Space is precious, I need those 8gb!

If anyone has any ideas I'm open to them.

 

[Ryan-D]

UPDATE:
I have used a directory checking program and found the "missing" space, labelled "Unknown"...

- but now I'm lost as to how to claim this back!