HDD filenames corrupt and show as folder icons!?! 1

[Doucha]

I have a 60 gb HDD and a 13gb HDD.About 3 weeks ago I defragged all. The PC has not been used for about 3 weeks.
The 13gb HDD is partitioned into 3, with the OS and main programs on, my 60gb has data, old programs, code, games, music etc. 2 days ago I put the whole inards of the PC into a new case. Used an Anti static and am totally competent at building PCs.

Only today I went to get a file for work, the D Drive (my entire 60gb, unpartitioned drive) showed the root directory fine and I went into a folder.
To my horor all the files within it were renamed to things such as W05~HJ.EXE, H45SA_.BMP etc.
I checked other directories and found that ALL had the same problem, they were all displayed as folder icons also.
My immediate reaction was to run Norton Antivirus, which bombed out due to a read error after about 2 minutes.

I then ran Win XP's Scandisk, this completed within seconds, to my horror once more I could now not even access the root directory in Windows Exploer - it says the Drive is not formatted.

I did a system restore and rebooted, before going back in I checked the BIOS. This seemed fine and I redetected my drive, it showed 197gb and had no Sector, heads or other information.
This alarmed me, so I didn't save settings and such down, I'm now at work and have been reading forums all day to try for an answer.
Thinking further throughout the day and my boot up has been slower, on detecting the Secondary Master (the 60gb), but I paid no attention as a CD was in my drive and my PC has always had intemitent booting problems when I CD is in, it's just very slow.
I have also downloaded some tools that may help.

If anyone has any help, advice, solutions, suggestions please help me I'll really appreciate it.

 

[wolluf]

1. Have you access to another machine you could slave this drive to?
2. Is it fat32 or ntfs filestore?
3. Did you mean scandisk or chkdsk? (xp has chkdsk). Have you tried booting into XP's recovery console & running chkdsk from there?

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q314058

4. Have you tried the drive manufacturer's utility for check the drive? (most have on on website).
5. What about data recovery apps. There's a free one here -

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

(better with fat32 than ntfs). Try Google search to find more (most not free -

http://www.winternals.com

has a non-free one which several people have recommended - good for ntfs).

 

[Doucha]

Wolluf,
1) I connected the drive to my old P3 running Win98 as a secondary master and ALL my data is thankfully recognised and safe. I've oreder a new 120gb drive to back it all up onto before I try anything with the drive. Win XP still says it's not formatted when I place the drive back so I'm leaving it alone till I can back it up
2) Fat32
3) Must have been ChkDsk then, and I'll try the recovery thing you suggest once I have my data backed up
4) I will check for on thanks, I didn't know of such things
5) Downloaded loads yesterday but hopefully now won't need them, got WinHex and Repoman, they seemed good.

I beleive that the IDE cable may have been in wrong, the nature of the case forced me to have it round a certain way, the blue plug NOT in the MB, but I did not realise this like a fool.
I think that when I ran the ChkDsk util, it screwed something up in the system, but thankfully not on the FAT, unless Win98 is reading the second FAT table or something. Thank the maker for Win98 I say