Gotta Love Xp!

[HydroCool]

Oh yeah...#1 reason why XP rocks my socks...Shutdown improperly, so it went into disck check..found a TON of errors.."Fixed" the errors. Apparently by "fix" it means to "delete" the required windows files...rock on! lost some mp3s that were hard to find and a website that allowed me to hack into my cellie...W00T Keep making me a strong MS fanboy guys..way to go!

[Kendan]

Did you back up? If not it is your fault. Drives can go bad at any time and I suggest you run drive diagnostic software on your drive.

[cornbread]

I have to agree with Kendan, backups, backups, backups. I have backups of my backups, no joke.

[stang8118]

If you have any important info you should definatly back up your system regularly. I am like Cornbread, i have backups of backups :p

Can never be to safe :)

[wazzledoozle]

Just get one of those external USB 2.0 160 gig hard drives with the "one touch backup" Press the button once a week and be happy.

[HydroCool]

problem is the main drive is 250 gig and cant back it up on anything thats realistically in my price range...im not complaining because everything i lost can be replaced but i lvoe how MS just went nuts with deleting everything in its raging furious path

[tenchi86]

Do you mean it marked sectors of the HDD as bad? Try some system restore or data recovery software(free trial). Also you may want to try a second partition and make backups on it. (so have like two windows on one drive or linux/windows.)

[JimmyG]

Do you really have your 250 gig drive full? Unless you are video editing, it is time for a house cleaning....:D

[HydroCool]

lol good point...its not even a 1/4 full

[eab]

Are you using NTFS or FAT 32 file system? I found if I crash and am using NTFS I don't have to do a scan of the hard drive looking for bad stuff .etc However when using FAT 32 I have to scan every time I crash or manulay restart. Stoped using FAT 32 for that reason.

[clash]

Use Reiserfs file system, you wont have these problems...

[GerrFel]

Or if you don't want to back up 250 gigs on a $500 backup drive, look into a $25 DVD burner. =D I love mine. Cheap media, cheap backups. Did I mention free movies?

[tenchi86]

500 drive? no way he would need something that much. he could get a say 50 doller drive and hook it up. That would easly handle how much room he actually need. Also yeah NTFS has a built in feature for bad shut downs. I forget its name has been long time since I have read about it, though it did something like saved settings in a way were it could be shut down improperly and file system was fine. ALso on check disk before it starts you have option to hit any key to cancell it if you wanted.

[Gnufsh]

Also yeah NTFS has a built in feature for bad shut downs. I forget its name has been long time since I have read about it, though it did something like saved settings in a way were it could be shut down improperly and file system was fine. ALso on check disk before it starts you have option to hit any key to cancell it if you wanted.
Could it be that ntfs is a journalized (well, partly journalized) filesystem?
http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index2.html

[tenchi86]

Probaly, I dont remember but I think thats what it was called. (to tired to read that). Any way have you tried any recovery software? So that you can retrieve your files.( I am intrested to know if it works or not)

[HydroCool]

mm not yet, i should though...all i basically lost were some songs and a couple of pictures that i know of..and to think this all started with MS Outlook not loading because some file was corrupted, which is why i let the check disk continue in the first place, not to mention that it took about 20 minutes to complete, things were getting "fixed" so fast that i couldnt read what it was actually doing, but everythings basically fine now cept for the pics and the songs...Seems to me that i have to re-install Winders about every 6 months now

[HydroCool]

HAHAH THREAD RESURRECTION! MS never seems to disappoint me when it comes to formatting and such...Right so I'm running a spyware check, found some goodies that need to be deleted from safe mode. So i "TRY" to boot into safe mode and it loads from a different OS. Didn't catch what happened so I did it again and it says "Could not find boot.ini, booting from C:\windows\" Seems normal right? Well c:\windows isnt the right windows\ dir, its supposed to be e:\WindowsA\ because of complication thats i had before with another install on the same drive. Well it boots to c:\windows...NOT GOOD. So i go into My Computer, and don't see the E:\ drive anywhere...DEFINITELY NOT COOL. Refresh MY Computer, maybe computers booting up still...Still no sign of it, so I reboot into Windows Setup, go in trying to repair an installation or what not and I can't find the e:\ windows setup, either one, So i exit out of that, reboot and try to do setup normally...WHAT DO I SEE? E:\ 250.9 GB Unpartitioned Space: 250.9GB thats definitely not what i like seeing, anyboy reccomend some good un-delete type programs, that work, for free?

[CrystalMethod]

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

Free one. I haven't tried the latest version though, so I don't know how good it is. I use GetDataBack, but I had to pay for it. First recovery I did for the shop I work at made me my money back and then some. You would be surprized how much people will pay to get stuff back they should have backed up in the first place.

[HydroCool]

thanks will try it, should have backed it up, didnt know it was gonna go down on me that quick. winders was only runnin for week or two before i got it all fixed and stable then BAM! oh well, it happens and hopefully these recovery programs will work, and replace the things i lost. Other programs ive tried found the files, but couldnt recover them because they were corrupt.