Tek-Tips is the largest IT community on the Internet today!

Members share and learn making Tek-Tips Forums the best source of peer-reviewed technical information on the Internet!

  • Congratulations strongm on being selected by the Tek-Tips community for having the most helpful posts in the forums last week. Way to Go!

And Suddenly, Your Hard drive partition Nearly Dissappears!

Status
Not open for further replies.

pyromuffin

Technical User
Mar 3, 2004
4
US
Holy crap, I booted up my computer when i got home and my 40 gig Western Digital HD (its in 2 partitions, 10gb C: and 30 for D:, C: is my windows, D: is for games and other stuff) drive D: is practically empty! ok, this gets weird now. C: is perfectly intact, hasnt been altered a bit (pun not intended) every file and folder is in its place. Now yesterday which is before everything dissappeared, my D: was about 22 gb full and now it has about 6 gb full. Everything but my spellforce (a game I recently installed) folder and image of the cd's is gone or altered in some way. these two folders are the only things left intact on drive D: . What else that was in D: after this "thing" happened was my FFXI folder, but seemingly random files/folders have been deleted out of it, and the game does not function anymore either. Aside from FFXI and Spellforce, everything else that was in my Drive D: is gone. BTW, both partitions are NTFS and im running Windows 2000 professional SP4, the hard drive is IDE.

Norton unerase doesnt pick up anything. Ive tried Stellar Phoenix disc recover or whatever its called and it finds the folder structure of my previously intact D: . At first i thought "YAY Ill get all my stuff back" but on closer inspection, That is all there is, Just folder structure, NO FILES. all the files within the folders are just GONE. Period. ive tried many unerase, Partition recovery, and forensic utilities, and NONE of them can pick up my lost files. I dont know whats going on here. The latest time i had checked my hard drive and i found that it was completely intact in all aspects was about 2 hours before i shut it down for the night. that leaves a small window for stuff to happen.

I first thought of a hacker attack, someone trojanned me, but i did scans and i find nothing, that also doesnt account for the seemingly randomness of the files deleted. (thousands of files, in random order are missing from my FFXI folder, would have taken many hours to have been done by hand) Virus scans show nothing as well. Then i thought of mechanical failure or some sort or magnetic intereference, but that doesnt account for C: being perfectly untouched. I really have no idea, or any kind of guess as to what happened, nothing seems to add up. I could really use help on this dire situation. i have done my best not to put anything on my D: drive so that nothing undeletable will get overwritten.

Please, I need some serious help or even a direction to go in. Thanks!
 
Oh yes, and some of the forensic utilities do pick up a lot of "lost folders" or "orphan files" which are a bunch of uniform files with random file names and common file endings such as .mp3, .wav, .jpg, .exe and .dat. none of these files do anything, it makes me think as if some files had been chopped up, renamed and given garbage file endings. sounds like a virus, but ive never heard of a virus do this.
 
a you gotta help me out. Maybe im in the wrong forum or something, and if i am, please tell me a better hard drive problem related forum.
 
Ok just a Quick ? on your drive when you formatted the Drive (D: Drive Most likely with Windows 2k) Did you use Quick format or format If you checked Quick format after labeling the drive. I have seen partitions and Hard Drives lose partitions sometimes some data most the time All data fromt he Partition while everything on the Main Partitions Formatted by Low level Dos formats. Is great in working order. If you did use Quick Format the only advice really is next time DON'T USE QUICK FORMAT. Sorry to here about the loss of Data always a Pain in the Butt!
 
Oh, I dont think I used anything like "quick format" I think I might have Used FDISK or like PowerQuest's Partition Magic. Anyways, My computer was running really slow and for no seeable reason, So I deleted my entire windows installation and all my HD contents and The Windows 2000 setup program told me my disk was damaged when it tried to format it. So, I used my trust windows 98 boot disk and redid my hard drive that way and I got Windows 2k to install all fine and now. So since it says it was damaged, i suppose i can attribute this whole fiasco to some kind of mechanical failure due to incorrect partitioning or something. Right now, Im using 1 big partition with no other partitions, so i dont think ill have this problem again.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.

Part and Inventory Search

Sponsor

Back
Top