Help! Winrar problems

Hi, here's my problem: I've been downloading maps for Counter-strike source online, and you download them as .rar files. so I download one that's a pack of maps and is about 100 MB in size, and it opens in Winrar (as expected). I then highlight all the folders in the .rar and copy it to my counter-strike folder, and it shows it extracting and everything but then nothing ends up in the folder I copy it to. I thought something weird happened, so I tried copying the folders multiple times but they still never showed up on the other side. At this point, I checked my free space left on my drive and it went down almost 2GB from files that seemingly went nowhere! Alarmed, I tried a system restore, but that only further reduced my free space left by another GB! So I undid the restore, and to my disbelief another 500-1GB was gone! So basically, I lost 4GB of free space getting nothing and not knowing where any of the files are anymore. My question to all of you is: where did the folders that were copied multiple times go?

 

Use Windows' search function to search for one of the maps from the .RAR file. That will tell you where they went

 

Well things just got a bit weirder...

I tried following your advice by searching up one of the folders, but that didn't turn up a single result. I then check my free space again and notice that it gained 1.5GB for no reason at all...

(so confused!)

 

It's possible that WinRAR was extracting everything to a temp folder, so Vista may be clearing that space now.

If you go to start and type in %temp% in the search box, it will pull up your temporary folder so that you can manually clear it.

 

is it ok to completely empty the contents of the temp folder?

 

Yes. Keep in mind that a lot of programs will cache information in the temp folder, so you may want to close all open programs first.

 

Heh, I just cleared my system restore, and it freed up 7 gigs of space! sweet!

thanks for all your help!