MAJOR data corruption after XP install and CHKDSK..

Hello. Sorry for the long post, I just want to make sure all the details are here, hopefully someone can help!

My installation of Windows XP was about 2 years old. It was all messed up, reached a point where it was unable to see my network connections, boot-up took 3-4 minutes and I was unable to open any MMC consoles. It could not detect the new USB external back-up drive that I just bought either, so I couldn't back-up the documents. I figure the easiest thing to do would be back-up "My Documents" to another partition and install Windows XP to see if that helps.' "

The 250gb drive is partitioned into 4 equal parts. The first 62gb partition was the OS/Apps and other partitions were documents, movies, music.

Windows setup prompted me to choose which partition to install to, so I deleted the C: partition and formatted it (NTFS) all within the Windows setup. I stepped away and when I came back there was a light blue screen and CHKDSK was spewing lost clusters, orphaned files, index problems, directory problems, and it was just scrolling up the screen very fast - and it was also "fixing" these so-called problems.

After Windows finished installing I figured all was well; the partitions were all there and folders seemed to be in tact. But when I started to look through the files the situation is VERY bad. Random documents are totally corrupted. Some folders appear to be missing. For some reason all EXE, TXT, RTF and some GIF files are totally fine! But DOC, JPG, ZIP, HTML, and more are completely ******* up. For example Word documents have strange characters throughout, instead of legible text. And JPG files are not displaying in any application. And ZIP files do not open.

I am trying to run the trial version of EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard right now. Okay it just finished and after trying the file preview it doesn't look good, the files are still corrupted... ****.


Is there anything else I can do to recover this data? Can someone suggest using another tool with better success rate? Please help!

I hate to accept that CHKDSK destroyed 2-3 years worth of data in just one shot!

Thanks.

 

I've personally seen Chkdsk do this, as have many other people to their cost. It often happens when there has been errors on a drive and chkdsk repairs them and then rearranges the file system. It can also happen if you had a Dynamic Drive Overly in the MBR of the hard drive to compensate for the BIOS not supporting a hard drive larger than the computer was designed for. Scroll about half way down this page to 'Software Translation'.

Another cause would be reinstalling XP from an original release CD that does not have at least SP1 on it. Without any of the Service Packs the original XP would only recognise 137gig of your 250gig drive and so would have seen a lot of references in File Tables to files that were unseen.

Make sure XP can correctly see all the hard drive. Look in Disk Management, a 250gig drive should come out at about 232gigs. If you have SP2 installed and the hard drive size is still not correct then check out whether you might have had a DDO installed. Even if the drive size is showing the correct size the partitions might still not be recognised properly, can you open and browse all the partitions and are they showing as NTFS? (or FAT if that's what they were). Only if you are sure all the drive is being recognised should you continue to try and recover the files. First off you should make a sector-by-sector clone of the drive, or at least the partitions, and work on that instead of the original. It will save you making matters worse and let you try out various things.

I'm sorry I can't offer any sure way of recovering your files as I also had no success with file recovery software. Since then I have come across a couple of things that I made note of to try someday. Try them at your own risk if you want.

http://download.com.com/3000-2094-10257269.html?part=75277 &subj=dlpage&tag=button

The other thing was to run chkdsk on the partitions again with the /v switch. In XP open a Command Prompt window and type chkdsk X: /v where X is the letter of the partition you want it to work on. You might also have to add the /x switch (really an x this time) to dismount the partition so chkdsk can run without rebooting "“ don't know if this would matter or not.
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/reskit/c28621675.mspx#ETB


McT

 

Gadzooks! What an excellent interpretation of the problem and suggestion for remedies McTavish I would add...zounds!

I was only thinking of rerunning chkdsk, but that has been truly overawed.

To save wasting space, I will say Hi to rezilient and welcome to the BBS. I hope you have luck with McTavish's suggestions.

Matt