NTFS File Recovery

  • Thread starter Thread starter Patrick Figueroa
  • Start date Start date
P

Patrick Figueroa

I have a system running windows XP sp1. This system has multiple hard drives
the OS drive is 40gb and I have another drive that is 200gb (both NTFS). I
recently reformatted the OS drive and reinstalled XP. The OS installs
fine... but after reboot it looks at my 200gb drive and runs a scandisk on
it. It fixes a number of "errors" on many files. Now when I browse through
this drive the files are still there with correct size, but they cannot be
opened, executed, or played with their respective applications. I now wonder
if this has something to do with XP having problems with drives over 120gb
pre-sp1. This scandisk was done before I was able to install sp1 so I guess
it moved the indexes of the files around or something. I hope I'm being
clear enough and please let me know if I need to explain a bit more.
Essentially I want to know if there is a way to recover these files. Thanks
so much for any help.

Patrick.
 
Try reinstalling the applications, they aren't in your
regeistry since you reinstalled XP.
 
It's not a matter of applications not being available to open these files.
I'm pretty sure they are corrupted or allocated incorrectly on the drive.
For example... Opening one of the videos or mp3s on the drive with windows
media player just comes back with an error "Invalid file type." I _think_
that during the scandisk, windows didn't recognize the drive over 120gb it
thought there were errors on the drive and fixed the files as a 120gb
drive... When in actuality it is a 200gb drive. I think this because some of
the files are fine and others are not. I'm probably not using the right
terminology here... But I hope that I'm getting the problem across. This is
what I think happened because the drive was fine before I formatted the OS
drive. Thanks again.

Patrick.



On 4/22/04 10:47 AM, in article [email protected],
"(e-mail address removed)" <[email protected]>
wrote:

Try reinstalling the applications, they aren't in your
regeistry since you reinstalled XP.


-----Original Message-----

I have a system running windows XP sp1. This system has
multiple hard drives the OS drive is 40gb and I have another
drive that is 200gb (both NTFS). I recently reformatted the OS
drive and reinstalled XP. The OS installs fine... but after
reboot it looks at my 200gb drive and runs a scandisk on
it. It fixes a number of "errors" on many files. Now
when I browse through this drive the files are still there
with correct size, but they cannot be opened, executed, or
played with their respective applications. I now wonder if
this has something to do with XP having problems with
drives over 120gb pre-sp1. This scandisk was done before I
was able to install sp1 so I guess it moved the indexes of
the files around or something. I hope I'm being clear enough
and please let me know if I need to explain a bit more.
Essentially I want to know if there is a way to recover
these files. Thanks so much for any help.

Patrick.
 
What do you mean by initialize? I think I'm misunderstanding you. From past
experiences "initialize" means "format" to me... I certainly don't want to
do that. I'm familiar with the disk management tool, what does this option
do? Thanks much.

Patrick.
 
No, Initialize is not formatting the disk. The OS may not have access to
the disk until you initialize it.

Bobby
 
No, Initialize is not formatting the disk. The OS may not have access to
the disk until you initialize it.

Bobby
Click to expand...

Please give us an example of how to initilize a disk. In which
OS ?
 
Windows XP

Start > All Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk
Management > Select drive > Initialize Disk.

Option will only appear on a disk that has not been initialized.

Bobby
 
Back
Top