It seems that you have compressed a fragmented drive. The header for your compressed drive is written in non-contiguous blocks. While this is not a problem as such, it will slow down disk access. If you are fortunate, your computer will have a second hard drive, or you will have access to a hard drive over a network with enough space to copy all the files from your compressed drive. Then you can repartition and reformat your drive before compressing it again and replacing the data. When copied back, the data will be written unfragmented. This is the simplest and safest way. Of course, if this were the case you probably would not have compressed the drive in the first place!
On the other hand, you could be very unfortunate and have far too much stuff on the hard drive to be able to uncompress it. This could be the case if you have installed even a few software packages after compressing the drive. You will have to delete some of the software before you can uncompress the drive.
A tip if you have Netscape Navigator: clear the disk cache before deleting anything else as this is by default set at 5Mb. Also, if you use a permanent swap file with Windows 3.1, either convert it to a temporary swap file or reduce its size. After uncompressing and recompressing the drive you can revert to your normal settings.
If you think you have enough free space, at the DOS prompt type drvspace or dblspace depending on what version of DOS 6 you are using. This will bring up the user interface which will allow you to work with your compressed drives. The main screen shows a list of your current compressed drives. Select the drive that you want to uncompress and choose the Uncompress option. The software should warn you if lack of space is going to be a problem.
Most importantly, before uncompressing the drive, back up all your data files!
- Roy Chambers