[sumomokun]

I was working on my computer last night and decided to reboot.
After I rebooted, Win XP told me that one of my drives needed to be checked for consistency, so I let it do that.

While it was doing that, I got the message that the index entry for MYDOCU~ was deleted. Imagine my surprise then. After Win XP was done loading, I tried to access the folder "My Documents" and it's gone!
It's not in the recycle bin and not where it normally is either. I did a search for it and nothing. (Now I'm really panicking, because my work is all in it)

I thought ok... maybe it's gone... so I take a look at my free diskspace and it hasn't increased at all. It should have because I have more than 15 gigs of data in My Documents.

Does anyone have any idea how I can recover my poor lost data??

I run WinXP Home Edition on a 1.8 Ghz machine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Oh. I patched my PC and even installed the whole shebang of patches from Windows Update.

 

[SPEEDO]

Welcome to TSF sumomokun.............

Have you tried all the usual things like scandisk and defrag. You could also try doing a fast repair by booting to the XP CD and following the prompts.

I take it you don't believe in backing up your valuable data.......:no:

 

[johnwill]

Since you got an error from SCANDISK, my guess is the directory entry for the My Documents folder was corrupt, and they turned it into a file. You need some data recovery software to search for the individual data files. You also need to seriously address your backup strategy!

 

[sumomokun]

I do periodic backups. Most of my data are backed up. But the things I was working on last night weren't. That's why I was concerned.

I haven't tried scan disk. I was afraid that if I use the PC too much, it might overwrite the files (or so I've read on a few websites on data recovery).

It wasn't SCANDISK that did it. It was CHKDISK.. Or maybe they're the same program?

 

[Volt-Schwibe]

heh

i also have read that you dont want to use the pc.

i have hear that you want to use some sort of a boot disk, or boot cd with a data recovery program on it.

you can also start windows with a boot disk and scan it that way. and that will sometimes bring stuff back without overwriting.


~BoB~

 

[sumomokun]

I found my files. They're under a folder named found.000
Except I'm unable to access it.
So I finally got hold of Easy Recovery Professional. Now I'm crossing my fingers and see if I can recover them.