recover files after XP reboot?

April 4, 2004 5:54 PM

Windows XP rebooted, and chkdsk set many of my files to zero bytes. How do I get what was originally in those files back?

And yes, I do have backups for some of them, but they are a couple of months old (mostly e-mail) and I would appreciate a solution for finding the files. I know that the data is there because I used Disk Investigator to search for key text. Unfortunately, the program has no way of recovering files except cluster by cluster, an extremely time consuming process.

posted by calwatch to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Is this FAT32 or NTFS? I'm not sure what chckdsk is doing when it does that (Google for technical details on chkdsk); but at this point I think only a sophisticated file recovery tool is likely to get your files back. It will have to try to reconstruct the file chain. Any disk writing you do or have done since chkdsk ran will potentially write over those sectors (depending upon how full your drive is).
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:47 PM on April 4, 2004

Oh: I bought RecoverNT (for NTFS) for this very purpose. I know there are sophisticated tools out there that will try to reconstrct the files automatically. How reliably they will be is another matter.

I'm guessing that you're using FAT32 and the FAT was corrupted in some way. NTFS's equivalent is kept redundantly and this is much less likely to happen.

Finally, keep in mind that you had some problem with your hard drive in order to get to this point. Chkdsk may have been very stupid, but that's no guarantee that all your data is actually still there.

Maybe someone will come along who can give you more specific advice.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 8:51 PM on April 4, 2004

No, this was NTFS. Eudora crashed before this happned, so apparently it didn't close the mailboxes properly, and dumped a bunch of other stuff, too.
posted by calwatch at 9:11 PM on April 4, 2004

You may find what you're looking for in C:\FILE????.CHK
posted by shepd at 4:37 AM on April 5, 2004

Apparently the vendor is no longer selling RecoverNT, but thank you for the suggestion.

I've isolated the hard drive so I don't use my D drive until I fix the problem. (I knew I partitioned that 80 gig hard drive six ways for a reason.)
posted by calwatch at 7:33 PM on April 5, 2004