Folders Disappeared and Replaced with 32k files

[joshbula]

Hello,

I have 2 drives in a system, C: is for Vista and programs, and the D: drive is where I store all my data, including users folders. They are two separate physical drives.

I recently downgraded to XP by formatting the C: drive and doing a clean install of XP. After completing the install, I tried to redirect the My Documents to the users folder on the D: drive but the users folder and all subfolders had garbled names, and double-clicking on them just gave me an error saying that the file or folder is not available.

I rebooted and the users folder was gone along with 2 other folders. They were each replaced by a 32k file with the name of the original folder and no file extension.

I tried a linux boot disk, and it showed the same thing--folders gone, replaced by the 32k files. I thought it may have been some kind of Vista permissions thing (even though I did NOT use any of Vista's encryption tools) so I re-installed my Vista installation from an image, and the same problem persists... even restoring the Vista image that I made just before formatting still can't read those folders on my D: drive, not even as administrator or in safe mode.

I tried running SpinRite, CheckDisk, and Restoration file recovery on the drive, and nothing helped. Restoration found a bunch of files and folders with the garbled filenames, but when restored, their names were still garbled and it's impossible to determine what files are what. Even after renaming them, they don't work.

The used and free space that explorer is reporting for the drive suggests that all the files and folders are still on the drive taking up space.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what may have caused this and how to repair these folders and the data within them?

Thanks!
...Josh

 

[kestrel1]

Have you enabled 'show hidden files & folders' on that drive?
It may be that the folders are hidden.

 

[joshbula]

Yes, it's set to show hidden files and system files.

 

[joshbula]

One more bit of information--not sure if it's relevant or not--but a few days ago I physically moved the drive to another IDE connecor. It was slaved to my DVD-RW drive, and now it's slaved to the C: boot drive. It was working fine like that until I did the XP downgrade.

 

[kestrel1]

Shouldn't make any odds where the drive is connected in the chain. Makes me wonder if Vista had some sort of encryption on the folders. This may have been on the profiles & this would be lost when the install of XP or vista occurred. Seems rather strange though.

 

[mart1381]

Similar thing just happened to me as well. Difference is I downgraded quite some time ago and there are no 32k files. I am so confused as to where 320+Gb of data could have gone. It still shows the drive as if the contents were there. I never really shutdown my computer but I was upgrading my RAM and my graphics card so I shut it down and upon reboot they were gone. Two separate locations.


I am going to try Hiren's Boot CD. Oh and the computer is less than 3 months old and the second hard drive is about a month old. I had about 300gb loss on the new hard drive and maybe 30 or something on the primary partition.