XP wiped out half of my files

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db

I have had nothing but good things to say about xp pro
until yesterday. I have 2 80 Gig hard drives on my
machine, the slave drive is my old master drive, and thus
formatted with FAT32 file system(if that matters). I went
to retrieve a file on this drive and got an error message
saying it was inaccessable. I should add that I've been
using this machine with this configuration for months,
with no problems. I've retrieved files from this area of
the drive many times. Anyway, I restart the machine, and
instead of the usual welcome screen I get something that
resembles a DOS-style boot scan, except with a blue
background, and it's apparently scanning my E drive for
errors or corrupted files. The scan moved very fast,
making it difficult to read. When it finished, the machine
started normally, but when I went back to the problem
area, the file (My Documents) was missing. I had roughly
20 GB of data stored in here, and now it's inaccessable.
When I check for available space on the drive, it's still
used up to the point it always was, so apparently the data
still exists. Other sections of the drive are accessable.
My question is, aside from why did this happen without my
asking, is: Can I still access this data somehow? Also, I
hadn't added any new data to this drive recently, and even
if there were one problem file, why wipe out everything? I
regularly scan for viruses, spyware, etc., but a virus
would infiltrate my C drive, not some file tucked away on
my E drive. Can anyone shed any light on this???
 
Funny that you would think that a virus would only affect your C: drive.

I had over 2900 .mp3 files from my F: drive deleted by a virus! But, as I
had them all burned to CD's I was not in such bad shape.

--
Regards:

Richard Urban

aka Crusty (-: Old B@stard :-)
 
I doubt very much that XP wiped out your files.. more likely that partial
drive failure knocked out you My Documents folder.. do a search in Google by
typing <file recovery> or similar and you should get a list of pages where
you can get free or 'have to pay' programs that will recover your files.. I
use Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro..

I would also suggest that you save what files are still accessible to your
primary drive before the rest of your secondary drive fails.. DO NOT format
the secondary drive until you have recovered any files..
 
I agree with Mike that this was most likely a physical disk problem,
and that you should assume that there is a substantial risk of the
disk deteriorating further and taking the rest of your data with it.

Follow his advice now and, in future, make sure that any files
containing data that you might want to look at or use again is backed
up to tape, CD-R, or DVD-R. The latter is becoming a very serious
option for backup now that multi-format drives are getting affordable,
and you don't have to worry about which of the competing formats to
support.

I have had nothing but good things to say about xp pro
until yesterday. I have 2 80 Gig hard drives on my
machine, the slave drive is my old master drive, and thus
formatted with FAT32 file system(if that matters). I went
to retrieve a file on this drive and got an error message
saying it was inaccessable. I should add that I've been
using this machine with this configuration for months,
with no problems. I've retrieved files from this area of
the drive many times. Anyway, I restart the machine, and
instead of the usual welcome screen I get something that
resembles a DOS-style boot scan, except with a blue
background, and it's apparently scanning my E drive for
errors or corrupted files. The scan moved very fast,
making it difficult to read. When it finished, the machine
started normally, but when I went back to the problem
area, the file (My Documents) was missing. I had roughly
20 GB of data stored in here, and now it's inaccessable.
When I check for available space on the drive, it's still
used up to the point it always was, so apparently the data
still exists. Other sections of the drive are accessable.
My question is, aside from why did this happen without my
asking, is: Can I still access this data somehow? Also, I
hadn't added any new data to this drive recently, and even
if there were one problem file, why wipe out everything? I
regularly scan for viruses, spyware, etc., but a virus
would infiltrate my C drive, not some file tucked away on
my E drive. Can anyone shed any light on this???
Click to expand...


Please respond to the Newsgroup, so that others may benefit from the exchange.
Peter R. Fletcher
 
XP has nothing to do with the problem. You either have a physical defect on
that hard drive, or have picked up a virus. If you have an antivirus
program, make sure it has the latest updates, then run it. If you don't have
one, get one. Also, most hard drives come with diagnostic software. Perhaps
it will resolve the problem.
 
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