[Jerrry Maguire]

Please excuse my lack of technical jargon!

So here's the deal. After looking around my external hard drive earlier, I got into a folder and noticed at least 2/3 of the sub-folders were missing. I checked around the other areas of the drive and nothing else has been affected.

For some reason the files have vanished into thin air!

When I click into the main folder (with the sub-folders missing) it runs slower than normal. After all this, I had been looking around the remaining sub folders and deleting some files whereupon I tried to press the back button to the main folder directory and what was left of the sub-folders had ALL dissapeared now.

I don't know where they have gone and am afraid of this happening to other files on my external HD like my catalogue of digital photos from 2003-present day!!!

EEK. SOMEONE PLEASE HELP ME.

I haven't done anything irregular this seems to have happened without warning.

The space left on my external HD has not changed although the folder says it is empty and is '0 bytes' when it was originally approx 5 gigs so perhaps it has to be somewhere?!

I tried searching for sub folder names but no luck.

Thankyou for ANY help!!!!!

 

[Kalim]

Have you checked recycle bin?

What were the filenames.. were they jpeg, gif, png, bmp, avi, wmv, mp3, mp4 etc?

Do this: Winkey+F>type: *.jpg,*.bmp etc for all files you expect to be in there and hit enter. See if they come up.

Sounds like a virus issue.

 

[Jerrry Maguire]

Unfortunately no luck there Kalim. Any further reccomendations?

I run Avast Antivirus and do regular spyware and ad-aware checks. I use Lavasoft Ad-Aware SE, Spybot Search & Destroy and Spywareblaster. I also run Mozilla Firefox not IE so the system is generally pretty clean.

 

[Kalim]

Wow. Looks like they're not there then.

Go to Start>Run and type: chkdsk /r
If it prompts you in DOS to run when system restarts, choose Y, hit enter and restart the system and it'll run.

See if that brings them back up.

 

[Jerrry Maguire]

Just got done doing the disk check. Still no luck!
ACK! I think I'm going to scream.

If you (or anyone else!) has anymore ideas PLEASE let me know. :smile:

 

[Jerrry Maguire]

I tried deleting the folder just now and got the following error message :

"Cannot delete 'folder name' : The directory is not empty"

Any leads with that information?


A link I found with someone who had the same problem however the answer given on the website doesn't seem to be helping me...

http://sg.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061114185455AAjvtAy

 

[elf]

You didn't somehow make the folders hidden by accident did you? Looks like that was mentioned on that other site as well.

Just so you know, if it is gone, it is probably still there... if that makes sense. If it is important information, you should stop working on it ASAP because copying, creating, or deleting files could overwrite important info on the drive.

Right click the drive in My Computer and see if it says the space is still being used. Or if you have other things on the drive, right click the folder that these subfolders were in and see what the size of the folder is.

 

[Jerrry Maguire]

The size of the HD hasn't changed from when they dissapeared however when I right click the folder they were in, the size has diminished considerably from what it was.

 

[Jerrry Maguire]

I can explain better visually than I can with words!

By my previous post I mean I checked the size of the main folder and it was considerably less than it used to be. Its now around 7000 files whereas it was closer to 30 000 before all of subfolder 2 went M.I.A. !! I also tried seeing the size of sub folder 2 and it reads as '0 files, 0 bytes'

However the HD itself has remained at a constant in regards to the amount of free space. It was around 12 gigs of free space before sub folder 2 and all the files contained went missing and is still around 12 gigs of free space.