Hard drive help

[Tommy Boomfiger]

I just reinstalled XP a few minutes ago. I formatted my HD and reinstalled. when it booted up for the first time checkdisk told me that one of my drives was corrupted and needed to be checked. i skipped it because it was my new 200 gig and i thought maybe it was only seeing 137. now that im booted up, its showing the full 200 (186 formatted) and 22.6 free. but a whole bunch of my files are missing. only about 7 gigs of stuff is still there.

my setup is XP is installed on a 15 gig on the primary ide channel. i have a 120 as primary on a promise ultra100 tx2 and the 200 as secondary. the promise came with the 200 from that dell deal a few months ago.

this is my first boot and i havnt written anything to it. im going to turn off my comp after this post and disconnect it before i reboot.

im really pissed right now and not thinking straight. any ideas on what to do to fix this. most of my stuff is gone, most of which wasnt backed up.

[djradam]

welll ... one thing i can say is most likely you won't get your stuff back. i could be wrong though.

same thing happened to me the other day actually. i switched my video card and when i booted up, scandisk or whatever said somethign was wrong with my 200gig HD. all my info is on it, so i had it do the "repairs" and it seems to have worked.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

im keeping an optomistic attitude. i mean, there has to be data there somewhere. its showing only 7 gigs of data on the drive, but 22 gigs free. that means there is a chunk not showing up in windows. if i can get most of the stuff i will be extrememly happy. the only things on there that arent replacable are some AIM logs and maybe some pics. but replacing the rest will take a lot of work and time and im hoping to skip that.

also, the disk was in NTFS.

im trying to think of some drive recovery software, but im pulling up a blank right now.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

ive used active@ ntfs reader for dos and the files that i lost are showing up in there. the number of files is so huge that i cant remember if all of them are there, but the directories are there (at least the important ones) and it looks like the files are there too.

because of this im assuming data recovery software should be able to recover this info. any suggestions? as always free is best, but due to the nature of this situation, im sure that is not the case.

for some reason, some of the files have shown back up, but only a very small amount. dont know how or why.

im thinking of using the zero assumption recovery (ZAR32) demo (http://www.z-a-recovery.com/download.htm) because it says the demo will recover 4 directories. i think all i need is one or directories, but there are about a dozen subdirectories and thousands of directories below that. i definately dont want to screw it up even more.

[GilbertsGrape]

i recomend
PC Inspector File Recovery
and it is free from download.com
use it often works great

[Tommy Boomfiger]

I tried PC Inspector File Recovery but i couldnt get it to work fully with NTFS. it found a handful of files, but nothing that was too important to me. maybe there is something im missing, but i cant get it to find any lost data when i click the find lost data button.

I also tried ZAR32 and it found all the files. at least i think it did. but the demo's 4 folder limit applies to sub folders. so it looks like if i go with that, im going to have to shell out the $100.

according to ZAR, the drives MFT is all screwed up.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

has anyone used Winternals FileRestore (http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/filerestore.asp?pid=fr)? its only $40 and claims to support ntfs but theres no demo.

[eSDee]

Originally posted by Tommy Boomfiger
has anyone used Winternals FileRestore (http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/filerestore.asp?pid=fr)? its only $40 and claims to support ntfs but theres no demo.

Send Winternals an email and tell them you are a Sys Admin and want to demo the apps to see if you should purchase them for your department. They will send you a demo copy. Or you could just purchase the software. I demo'd a few of their other products and they were solid.

[Jeffbx]

Originally posted by Tommy Boomfiger
has anyone used Winternals FileRestore (http://www.winternals.com/products/repairandrecovery/filerestore.asp?pid=fr)? its only $40 and claims to support ntfs but theres no demo.

I've used Winternals DiskCommander - works good. Helped me restore a partition that someone had removed, re-created & formatted (heh - ex-employee hoping that we wouldn't get all of his business contacts. Too bad!)

Also look at Recover4All (http://www.recover4all.com/) - this one has proven to be very valuable at recovering deleted files as well.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

I tried Recover4All, but it only found one directory and about 20 files.

im going to try ZAR32 next and definately going to try and get some free demos from Winternals.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

ok, after all that, i rebooted and left the room and when i got back, i saw that checkdisk fixed all the files on the disk. all the files are there by name, but a lot of stuff is corrupted beyond recognition. some strange things too. it seems like the data is there, but mixed up in different files. a lot of my pictures are not able to be read. some media files play content from other files. so its scrambled. its going to be a bitch to sort all this stuff out, i got over 60,000 files in 5,000 folders. i havent deleted anything yet and i havent written to the disk. dont know what the system has. i know that xp automatically creates and saves the thumbs.db files for any folder with pictures. i tried disabling some of that but it didnt seem to stop it.

at this point i doubt there is anything i can do to sort out all this mess except doing it manually, deleting and replacing files that are messed up. it seems that about 90% of my music collection is intact, which is pretty nice. but if anyone has any more ideas, they are very welcome.

im pretty sure that it had something to do with the MFT. ZAR is still showing that the MFT is screwed up, so i guess my next task is to back everything up and format the drive. guess im gonna need some more dvds

[Tommy Boomfiger]

i got over 7000 mp3s. i did a search for all the mp3s on the drive and set it to show some of the ID3 tags. i have most of them tagged, anything with a tag seems to play properly. obviously im not going to go through every file, but it seems to work for now. some of the files without tags dont play while others play content from completely different files. and there doesnt seem to be any sort of reason to it. like if theres a folder from one CD, there will just be a jumble of other songs in there. the thing that sucks the most is that there are some really great songs in the corrupted files and they are from all over the drive. its going to be a pain to sort it all out.

[Tommy Boomfiger]

well, i spent the last 2 days checking all the files on the disk. it was a lot easier than i thought it would be but i noticed something pretty strange.

it seems like the bits were all scrambled up, but that wasnt really the case. it seems like all the data from the bad files was lost and replaced with data from others. i found a lot of files with content from mp3s. you would think that the data was misplaced from one file to the other, but that wasnt the case. it was copied. its pretty strange, but it also means that the damage isnt as bad as i thought it was.

[DaFunkyUnit]

sounds like the allocation tables were messed up. but you said it was NTFS, and i'm not really sure how that mechansim works. so i'll shut up now :)