Filesystem woes
 

Aaaah... I'm not sure how I should articulate what I want to say, but I guess I'll start with the following:

FUCK.

There. In a bit more detail, I guess what I mean to say is, I apparently just lost 130GB worth of data on one of my drives because of a filesystem error. I'm running Windows XP SP1 with NTFS as filesystem for that particular drive. Now, what I want to know is, is there a way to recover that stuff now? Or, actually, HOW can I recover that stuff, because I sure as hell won't take "You can't do that" as an answer.

The first clue I got that something was wrong is the message saying that, well, essentially there was an issue with the filesystem on my E: drive and which oh so helpfully told me to run chdisk. Which I did, by rebooting. And which proceeded to display the message "DELETING ORPHANED FILE INDEX (INSERT ONE OF MY PRECIOUS FILES HERE)" roughly a bazillion times. Fucker. So, yeah, that was pretty much my second clue that something was wrong. Third was the unusually high amount of free space on said drive when I checked after my computer was done booting up.

Anyway, it's a drive with mostly data on it, but some of that stuff I don't have backup for due to the space it would take, and probably won't be able to get again except with much effort, if at all. My books...

So, yeah, how do I recover that stuff? For now I'll shut my machine down in order to prevent Windows from doing a "preventive defrag" or whatever the hell it'll probably try to do. I'll check back tomorrow morning.

And I was halfway through "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!", and enjoying it quite a bit too.

Start up the Windows Recovery Console via the WinXP disc and run:

CHKDSK /f

on the affected drive and let me know how it goes. I believe SP2 fixes this issue if CHKDSK /f works for you.

I'd say try getting the harddrive utility tools from both Maxtor and Western Digital, those have solved random problems I've had a few times now when things went wrong (also try searching their websites for problems similar to your own). You can always give Partition Magic a shot, though I've never had much luck with it.

I think it was the Western Digital tool that saved my 80GB partition from being lost to some mysterious cause (I think it had to do with some wonky issue in Alcohol accidentally removing something that caused something to do something which made me waste three days fixing my drive).

CHKDSK has, in my experience, always done more harm than good. I've found "GetDataBack for NTFS" a very valuable and effective tool. The downsides: You need enough space on another drive to backup the data you want, it'll take an awfully big amount of time on a big drive, and it's not freeware.

Run CHKDSK /f it may be that all your files need indexing again.

I get this error sometimes when I reinstall windows XP, I can't see any of my files, so I just run CHKDSK /f, and basically it recovers all of my files and reindexes them, and then I can see/access them.

It seems there is no such thing as an /f option for my version of chkdsk... I did, however, attempt it with the /r option, supposed to repair stuff.

It failed miserably.

As I don't have 130GB worth or free space anywhere, that "GetDataBack for NTFS" program isn't of much use. I'll try something with partition magic, then I'll try to get a CD for WinXP SP2 and boot on that. The drive in question is a Western Digital, but unfortunately, I don't think it came with any software, so I guess I can't try that.

Any other ideas are, of course, welcome.

EDIT: Ok, so it seem partition magic sees 14% of the partition, or roughly 20GB, as "Bad". Though it doesn't seem to be possible to repair it with partition magic.

Butcher, you can download software from the WD website. You don't seriously think I drag all of my installation disks with me when I'm at school, do you?