> Even if a 100 TB disk was free, I am still not eager to reinstall > Windows.
At some point though (if not already) you are going to have spent more time
trying to fix these things than it would have taken to just reinstall.
Didn't you spend ages trying to defrag this drive a while ago too? If it
was me I'd just bite the bullet and reinstall before I wasted any more time
on such issues.