XP Home addition SP screwed up

[FoFa]

My daughters PC with XP Home edition seems to have had a hard disk issue. networking just quit, then I ran check disk and ended up with a bunch of those file fragments. Now I can only start it in Safe Mode. The rescue disk that came with the PC wants to format the hard drive and start from scratch. I would not like to do that if I can get around it. Any other options any one know of to repair it withouot formatting the hard drive? The only true windows disk I have is XP Pro for my computer.

 

[Minkey]

First try a boot into safe mode and go to start > run and type "cmd" enter and then "chkdsk /f" (without quotes of course)

You may get a message saying chkdsk cannot run bla bla etc. you will get the option to run it when it restarts.

If that helps you should do a defrag straight away - BTW diskeeper lite is a great alternative to windows defrag that is much better.

If you still have can get into windows normally you should have the option of doing a repair to your installation (did you not get that option?)

 

[FoFa]

If that helps you should do a defrag straight away - BTW diskeeper lite is a great alternative to windows defrag that is much better.

Diskeeper is loaded, and when I try to defrag I get an error saying "can not connect to DiskKeeper" (or something to that extent). I did run (whatever you run via Tools) to check the disk, and said to fix it, that is where I got all those FOUND.xxx file fragments from, must have 50 of them.

 

[Minkey]

Ah that help's you might want to look at this

You can delete the .chk files in the FOUND.xxx folders, I've had this before (a while ago mind) - It does refer to FAT volumes so is your disk FAT rather than NTFS - if so I'd suggest you reformat it to NTFS (once you've got everything running and backup of course)

 

[Vassago]

Found.xxx files can be from an NTFS system too... You don't want to delete this right away because you can sometimes use a restoration program to restore those files to what they truly are. These sort of problems usually stem from problems with your boot.ini and boot sectors preventing your computer from properly recognizing your partitions.There's a lot of free tools on the net that can recover files.. unfortunately I don't have any links to them anymore.

Is this hard drive by chance larger than 137gb? Have you made sure to update your drivers for your controller card if you do? If your drivers are bad, they can cause this problem...I've experienced this problem with my controller card and once I updated the drivers, the problem disappeared (after losing way too much of my data.)

 

[Minkey]

Good points Vassago - as for data recovery I can recommend Handy Recovery I've only tried it on deleted files not sure if it work with restoring Found.xxx files (maybe worth a try). This is the 30 day trial version

 

[collar]

Hello,

I suppose the really powerful data recovery utility is Active@ Undelete or Uneraser (for pure DOS) tools. These are really mighty utilities, they never failed me before. I'm pretty sure that will help you solve tyour problem.

http://www.active-undelete.com/

http://www.uneraser.com/