What on earth are these enormous files??

[Zedbee]

I have a 250GB external portable HDD, which I keep all my music on, and my iTunes library so I can plug it into different computers and always have all my music with me. I only have about 130GB of music, although my music folder on the drive says 144GB (which is fine).

What IS baffling me it this... I did a quick search for files over a certain size on the whole drive, and it seems my artwork folder takes up 142GB of space! and when I look at the files/folders, they appear to be garbage - I've attached a screenshot.

I have no idea what these files are and I seem unable to delete them as I get a message:

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Error Deleting File or Folder
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Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk.
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OK
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Has anyone seen these files before? Know what they are and why they are taking up SO much space?

[electrozoid]

It appears that the file allocation table of your drive has gone kaputz. The FAT is where the drive stores the name, size and location of your files on disk (the three of which show wrong information to you). The correction to this is use a drive utility like chkdsk (native to Windows) or from some third party (Norton used to be king with these tools). I'm reluctant to suggest you do that immediately as if things are really messed up the correction may actually wipe them from your HD making recovery even harder. I would look for specialized recovery services at your local computer repair shop.

[Zedbee]

Yes that makes sense, thanks for pointing me in that direction. I tried to do an analyse using the disk defragmenter, and it said the hdd was corrupted. I've not had any problems with my music though so I'm just going to copy all my music onto a temp hard drive, try to do check errors, if that fails, I'll just reformat the disk and put the music back on it. I'm sure that will sort the file allocations out.