Chkdsk and orphaned files

[Myau]

Please someone help..
I think I've lots tons of data from my hard drive and I'm not sure how to get it back now.

I had 2 hard drives = C: (4GB) and another 250 GB which was partitioned into 3 parts of ~80GB each (D, F, G).

I recently got another 250 GB drive. I wanted to install win2000 on it and get rid of my 4GB drive.

I booted the computer from the disc, and begun to install win2k on the new drive (with all the other drives still plugged in).

When the computer rebooted and it was booting into windows, I got the black screen, chkdsk started running and I started getting a huge list of something or other going on about orphan files being moved to different directories. I didn't know what was happening and I let if go for quite a while thinking it was doing what it was suppose to do. Finally I started getting scared because I realized whatever it was doing, it was touching files which it was not suppose to, because I was installing windows on a whole brand new clean (partitioned, NTFS) drive, and I didn't understand why it was moving/touching files from my other drive! I rebooted the computer right in the midst of what it was doing.

Now when I startup windows, I skip the chkdsk, and when I look at the contents of my drive through explorer, ALL those files which it was messing around with, are now missing!! I imagine that if I allow chkdsk to continue, the rest of the files will go missing as well..??

can anyone please help?? where did those files go (were moved to) and how can I restore them??

 

[pcaceit]

Hi and welcome.

wow...... resetting or powering off while there were Read/Write operations in progress was not the thing to do, could almost gaurantee data loss or hdd corruption when you do that.

You probably had a corrupt partition table on the Disk you had your original system on.

Is the partitioning scheme on the original disks still the same?

If the partitions are still the same then use one of tools in the Links below to try and recover the data on them.
The software is shareware/trialware so it might have limited functionality or usage period.

https://www.techspot.com/downloads/382-active-file-recovery-for-windows.html
http://www.active-undelete.com/

if the partitions have changed then you will need to use a tool like "Partition table doctor" Link is below.

http://www.sofotex.com/Partition-Table-Doctor-download_L17602.html

If you have to use partition table doctor, then you select the hdd from the drop down list, then click operations, and select "Rebuild partition tables"


Then once you have all your old data recovered, Using your Windows you should Delete the 4Gb System partition on the original Drive before you install windows again (save anything you want on it to another partition first).

Hope this was of help.

Good luck

 

[Myau]

Hi, thanks for helping out. The partitions on the drive are still the same, just one of the partitions has missing folders/files. Would it be best to try to backup whatever is left on that partition before I do any kind of recovery attempt?

The only way I can do that is if I backup the data on the new 250GB drive, but now there are some kind of problems on that drive because of the failed Win2K install attempt. The drive was fine before (accessible, formatted and had NTFS partition), but after I tried installing the OS on it and didin't go through the whole process, I attempted to format it again. It wouldn't go through the format. It always just gets stuck at 2% and doesn't go anywhere. I can't access it through explorer anymore either; says the drive is not formatted. Is there any better ways to format it instead of through using the Win2K CD??

Thanks!