Also ran the drives' generic Window's error-checking tool and the Western Digital Lifeguard Diagnostic's Tool over the drive's two partitions. No problems found, both tool's checks showed no errors.
Rampant here for a solution. The kid needs his cartoons and wildlife shows.
Managed to run a defragment tool, O&O Defrag 10, completely over the first partition (without it disappearing) and it found like an extra 100 GBs of space, i,e., changed from 40 GBs of free space to over 140 GBs of free space. Don't know whether or not this is significant, but I certainly found it very unusual (however, I've had zero experience with heavy duty external drives. Only ever used USB flash drives).
Message Edited by Somchai111 on 11-27-2008 07:24 AM