Righty then, before I begin, it might not have been best to ban the only person who might be able to help me.

Anyway, I had this HD (Drive E ) which I was using to store stuff on.
However, everytime I booted up, I was told by Scandisk that it had 'errors' and need 'fixing'.

Eventually I got bored with cancelling this thing and ran scandisk through Windows and told it to get on with 'fixing'.

I then got another message asking me if I was certain something in the HD was what it thought it was.
It warned of 'damage' if it was wrong.

SO: I started it going and it kept giving me messages on problems. I didn't want it to automatically fix them, so they kept coming. Constantly. All very similar messages.

Anyway, I got bored pressing enter, so I left a small rock on the enter key and went away for half-an-hour.

I came back then and checked the progress. Still those messages.

Worry overtook me here, wondering if Scandisk was consuming my HD. I stopped it and went to my HD.

It was a disaster.

I noticed that a folder that had been 200+mb had been reduced to 34mb.

Lots of other files are corrupt.

HELP!!!

This actually happened several months ago, but the HD has been unplugged since while I pondered what to do. Have I lost everything?

(Note: Everything that wasn't corrupt I dragged off the HD)

I HATE Scandisk and all associated with it!

there may be a recovery program you could try. Otherwise I suggest making sure you can get you have backed up then format and reinstall. Aaron will be back in a few hours, anyway, hopefully not drunk this time! xP

I'd like you to try the disk checking feature...

Go to [i]My Computer[/i], and access the Properties of Drive E...


Go to the [i]Tools[/i] tab and click [i]Check Now...[/i]


Tick the 2 checkboxes and click [i]Start[/i]


Click [i]Yes[/i] when you see this message

Restart your computer and let the disk check finish its business.

Let me know how you get on

Edit: As for whatever caused this problem; you may find this article very informative..

You want.... SpinRite. The ultimate disk recovery tool

[url]http://www.spinrite.info[/url]

The disk checking heracy was the naff that got me here in the 1st place (Windows 98, its scandisk).

As for SpinRite, I'll try that later (today hopefully).

Thanks for the feedback.

[quote="azcn2503"]
you may find this article very informative..
[/quote]

Oh yes. . .

Oh yeah, spinrite isnt free

And unfortunantly azcn could be right

Yees. Since I now have a larger HD and just want the data, I want to just drag everything off the broken one.

I'll try the error checking thingy, but I am dubious as to whether it will work. I dont want to lose anymore data.

You can't lose data if it's not usable or accessible, it's lost already. What you are attempting is to find data that you have already lost, but just think it's there.

Oh darn.

eh? what?

I was referring to the fact that you say my data is gone for good.

You may want to invest in an external hard drive, or a NAS box from now on

What's a NAS box?

Network Attached Storage. A drive that you can access over the network from multiple computers

[url=http://www.overclockers.co.uk/productlist.php?groupid=701&catid=14&subid=707]Here are some examples of NAS boxes[/url]

Ooh.