Computer Problems

So Saturday and Sunday I was having various problems with Windows, (first with DirecX, then with telephony) and my attempts to solve these issues seemed to only create new ones. I said "fuck this" and reformated the system drive and installed a fresh copy of Windows. Now, I keep all of my documents and media on a seprate 150Gig Hard Drive (F), just in case I needed to do that.

 

Well, earlier today I started getting various "corrupt file" errors, and such for my F drive, after reinstalling some games on it. Windows suggested that I should update it to solve the problem. So I installed the various updates for Windows, and rebooted my computer. It promptly ran the check disc utility on the F drive before loading, and seemed to find quite a large number of errors. After more updates, reboots and a tad bit more error fixing I was done. I decided to play some Halo 2 with my friends, and since I was unplugging the internet anyway, I shut down the computer. When I rebooted, I found all of the main folders on my F drive were missing. Thing is, the remaining folders amount to just 3 gigs, while Windows tells me there is only 35Gigs of free space on the drive! Obviously, my data is still there. I tried some data recovery tools, which failed since the files have not actually been deleted. So the problem is (to my understanding) that the files are still there, but the folder structure has been destroyed or corrupted.

 

So the question is, how do I fix this and get my data back? I really don't want to resort to reformating the drive and loosing all my data. Heck, even if I get all the files back, I'll probably pick the most important ones, back them up on DVDs, and reformat the drive just to be safe.

 

Either way, I won't be able to play WoW untill I come to some sort of a conclusion. Without my F drive in a normal state, I don't really have anywhere to install it.

 

Oh, and yes, I checked six times, and there are no viruses, trojans, worms, etc. on my computer. Unless McAfee sucks, which I hope it does not.

ouch that sounds like an awful problem that I've thankfully never encounted and have no idea how to solve, so reallly this is just a waste of a post and making you feel worse...........

 

Sorry about the problems, and the post

Since the drive isn't your operating system drive, this makes the task a hell of a lot easier. I ran into a very similar problem myself when upgrading some of my mother's computer to a ripped copy of windows that had a few interesting goodies that came with it...my fault for not checking, but then, you assume your friends won't do this to you.

 

In any case, there are plenty of utilities that you can find online, order, or possibly find in places like Best Buy, that can read directly from your drive. Now, here's the problem, if windows doesn't think the area exists, then it may in fact be overwriting some of your files. I can't say without taking a look in person (I've always sucked at long distance diagnosis and I blame peoples' general inability to notice important details like flashing yellow/red lights on their desktop that they have to drag windows around to see the contents...*ramble on*). Still, depending on how long this problem has been going on, there's very little chance of this happening as windows is smart enough to overwrite clearly marked important documents before taking a gamble on what may be useless paging memory.

 

The downside of these programs is that they don't reconstruct the files using the drive's index (which makes sense because they're mainly intended for use when someone accidentally opens a compiler and through sheer luck writes an assembly program that manually writes a long string of 0s to the drive's index), so what I'm trying to say is that while the files may be restored, they won't be named. That means you get to open 150 gigs or whatever you had's worth of files individualled and rename them.

 

Hope that helped. Off the top of my head I don't remember the names of the programs I used, but I do remember it took me about 5-10 minutes of google searching to find something that ran off a floppy.

Well, I found a nice free program to recover files, and got back enough to be happy about. (10gigs worth) The only thing I'm missing are my precious, precious Morrowind save files, but I guess I can take time off WoW to re-create my impressive lvl 40 character.

 

Anyway, I should be back on WoW later today or early tommorow.

excellent! nice work siege

By any chance, did you try to convert a FAT32 partition to NTFS when this happened? Or was that other partition in FAT32 and you're using XP. If so, this happens a lot with XP, regardless of how "backwards compatible" they tell you it is.

Nah, they were both NTFS.