I have a 300gb SATA drive, NTFS formatted, that has most of my movies & music on it. After a lengthy move and installing a new operating system on a different drive, it's done something I never have seen before: about half the files on the disk point to some random location of the disk, so movie files go to the middle of MP3s, MP3s go to random places in entirely unrelated MP3s, etc. It's a massive mess. I ran the NTFS repair utility (without doing a backup, stupid) and it only had the effect of setting about half of the affected files' sizes to zero. I'm fairly sure at this point it's a lost cause, and I'll save what I can & reformat, but has anyone run into this problem before? Is there some magical way out? What on earth could have caused it?
posted by devilsbrigade on Jul 11, 2009 - 6 answers

Easy Windows XP question, yet hard to google: Is there anyway to set the 'select file' dialog boxes used by virtually every program to sort by Modified Date instead of Name? [more inside]
posted by ZackTM on Jun 25, 2009 - 1 answer

What filesystem should I use on my new USB 2.0 external hard drive? It'll mostly stay attached to an Ubuntu box and be used to store large video files for streaming to playback devices on my network, but I'd also like to be able to take it to a friend's house and plug it into whatever computer they happen to have. [more inside]
posted by contraption on May 2, 2009 - 12 answers

Why is it OK to have no reserved blocks in ext2 on the Acer Aspire One? [more inside]
posted by Busy Old Fool on Apr 6, 2009 - 4 answers

How does windows do filesystem caching? [more inside]
posted by torpark on Mar 18, 2009 - 6 answers

What would cause certain folders to show up when a DVD is mounted under Windows (XP, FWIW), but not to show up under Linux (Ubuntu Intrepid)? [more inside]
posted by claudius on Mar 5, 2009 - 7 answers

Whats the Difference between a file system and a partition in Ubuntu? [more inside]
posted by complience on Feb 25, 2009 - 13 answers

Does anyone know of some good Computer books that really talk about the structure of computers and how they work in depth? Like file systems, boot process, assembly, hardware details like how the processor works, BIOS, and all that good stuff
posted by CZMR on Dec 31, 2008 - 17 answers

How do I create a "custom file" in Windows XP? [more inside]
posted by Gyan on Nov 20, 2008 - 24 answers

My fantastically unstable IBM T42 (which is on it's 3rd, soon to be 4th, life) died a little while ago, no longer booting into Ubuntu. However, it loves to boot into Windows. How do I nuke both? [more inside]
posted by tmcw on Jul 11, 2008 - 8 answers

I want to copy a 6.5Gb file from my Linux machine to my Macbook running Tiger as quickly as possible. I have a USB drive. What is the best way to do this? [more inside]
posted by beniamino on Apr 4, 2008 - 13 answers

Why does my hard drive keep losing it's file system and switching from NTFS to RAW? [more inside]
posted by itchylick on Sep 22, 2007 - 2 answers

Are there file dependency management systems out there? [more inside]
posted by philosophistry on May 22, 2007 - 1 answer

I accidentally formatted my NTFS drive with HFS and wrote some data on it. Now how do I recover whatever is left? >>>Any filesystem experts around here? [more inside]
posted by oneous on Apr 26, 2007 - 6 answers

I have a new hard drive that I have added into my system. I've partitioned it three ways. The first partition is what I would like to add onto /opt, the second is some additional swap (added with no problem), and the third is the one that I'd like to add onto /home. How do I make this work with UnionFS? [more inside]
posted by Xoder on Apr 15, 2007 - 8 answers

In a journaling file system like ext3, a journal entry is written before each file system change, describing the change about to be carried out. This allows quick recovery if the actual file change is interrupted or not carried out due to power outage or whatever. But why is the act of writing the journal entry not susceptible to the exact same threat of being interrupted? [more inside]
posted by chrismear on Apr 10, 2007 - 10 answers

I’ve got a new 400gb drive heading my way, plus a free copy of Vista. What is the best way to rebuild my system, with XP, Vista sharing files etc. with maybe a little Ubuntu thrown in? There’s [more inside]
posted by nazca on Dec 18, 2006 - 7 answers

How can I set Mac OS X so that it doesn't create .DS_Store, .Trashes, and ._* files on USB drives I work with? [more inside]
posted by odinsdream on Aug 23, 2006 - 9 answers

I have a problem with the hard disk on my iBook. [more inside]
posted by nowonmai on Jun 27, 2006 - 5 answers

Is it possible to convert a FAT32 disk to HFS+ in-place (i.e., with all the data intact)? [more inside]
posted by dmd on Apr 3, 2006 - 8 answers

WindowsXPFilter: This has to be the strangest problem I've ever had... I can't access files that start with the letter 'Q'. [more inside]
posted by jedrek on Feb 14, 2006 - 8 answers

Sharing hard-drives between Linux and Mac OSX (tiger). Which filesystem? [more inside]
posted by odinsdream on Aug 24, 2005 - 18 answers

Can I read/write a Mac OS Extended (Journaled) disk on Windows XP? [more inside]
posted by odinsdream on Jul 29, 2005 - 9 answers

I have a CD with some software on it. When I copy the files from that CD, the size of the files on my hard drive are far greater than the capacity of the 700mb CD it came from! [more inside]
posted by viama on Mar 30, 2005 - 13 answers

Browsing the hard disk from a flash webpage.
a) is it possible?
(I know it is - i've seen a component that does it. But i want the actionscript that does it)
b) help
(i just need some pointers - tutorials, actionscript snippets and so on) [more inside]
posted by FidelDonson on Dec 6, 2004 - 13 answers

Can anyone recommend a program (in say perl or java or something) that will execute on my linux web server and a) slurp the file references in the pages (html, php) and b) compare them to the actual files in my web root tree giving me a list of all of the unreferenced files (not referenced on public web pages)? I want to clean up this junky file system, but I don't want to break any links and I inherited the mess. Thanks.
posted by pissfactory on Sep 13, 2004 - 5 answers

Here's a hard one: why can’t I copy my files? [More griping inside] [more inside]
posted by Termite on Jun 28, 2004 - 7 answers

The bell tolls for ME. Help this loser to upgrade from Windows ME to XP Pro. [4 questions inside...] [more inside]
posted by Termite on May 2, 2004 - 12 answers

Windows XP rebooted, and chkdsk set many of my files to zero bytes. How do I get what was originally in those files back? [more inside]
posted by calwatch on Apr 4, 2004 - 5 answers