I recently upgraded to WinXP. My 98SE installation was a bit flaky... This is my secondary, 10.2 GB FAT32 (so really 9.54) drive which I had a whole bunch of stuff stored on. I wiped my primary drive, installed winXP, and things seemed to be working OK. I came across some corrupted files on D:. I wasn't too surprised, as my IDE devices were acting very flaky under 98SE (thus the clean sweap and install of XP). The corrupted files were ones I copied from C: to D:, and it hung while doing some of the copying. I did it again and thought it worked ok, but . BUT, I ran whatever that disk-check utility for XP is, it just told me "check completed". Today though, I find that most of the disk's directories are gone. The weirdest thing:

My computer and explorer show 176 MB free out of 9.54 total.
But, when I go to Computer Management in the control panel, it tells me:
3.94GB FAT32 Healthy (active). 5.62 GB unallocated?
Looking around the forum I found reference to Treesize Professional. I downloaded it, it says 2,716.5 MB D\


What gives???????? I have built several PCs and troubleshoot them, but I haven't seen this before. Anyone have any suggestions???? I had some important stuff on that drive!!

Ok look for files with the name File000x.chk (the extension won't show unless you have enabled it...by unchecking "hide known file extensions"). It kind of sounds like something on that drive is corrupted and all the files were considered "lost chains" and converted to check files.......you might be able to recover it if your 98 install on it was bootable, orignally.

You can try by unplugging the drive with XP and jumpering the second one to master or single drive. Then using a 98 bootdisk, type fdisk_/mbr (space instead of underscore). If it can't recover the info then most likely all the data is lost and the drive will need to be wiped to make it useable again.

With what you were describing it sounds like ther may be a problem with it anyway, so try the manufacturer's diagnostics to get an idea of the drive's state of "health".

If you can recover by fixing the MBR, use the bootdisk again, and type in fdisk and the choose the option about making a partition active.......and make sure that this one is not.

The D: drive hasn't had a win98 install on it in ages, I was just using it for storage space. I was kind of thinking MBR as the problem myself. I am downloading a few shareware FAT drive recovery programs, I will attempt using them. So far I was using a program called Zero Assumption Recovery, but it is a demo version. I have gotten some files back using it, but the demo version limits me to 4 directories per scan/restore. If neither program works out, I will try using the win 98SE CD to attempt to fix the drive, as I can't seem to find a win98 boot disk around here...
Thanks for the idea! I wish my copy of Norton Utilities had come through the mail already...
Dave

If you don't have a boot disk handy.....www.bootdisk.com

Thanks for the bootdisk link! Very useful. I downloaded a program called GetDataBack that managed to recover all the files lost on the screwed up drive (about 6 GB worth!). Yay!!! That was most of the important stuff. It looks like the MBR was indeed screwed up somehow. I think when I ran the XP-scandisk on it, it just screwed it up worse, like it assumed the screwed up files had the correct BR, and the old ones didn't (since I was able to recover all of the old files). Out of the other files that still showed up normally on the drive, about 2/3 of them gave me the message "the parameter is incorrect" when I tried to copy them. However, it was all non-critical stuff for the most part (except for my Heroes 4 saves!!), old storage mostly. I was going to re-jumper it and recover the remaining gig or two, but since it was mostly non-critical stuff that I can re-download, I am just going to wipe it.
I figured the 2 GB or so that I lost wasn't a big deal, nothing really critical. So I went into Computer Management and wiped the 3.4 GB partition, leaving all 9.55 GB as a single unpartitioned, unformatted drive. I partitioned the drive as a single 9.4 GB drive, and I am now running a full format on it to NTFS.
I guess the lesson I learned from this is beware the XP-checkdsk program?? Thanks for the advice, it did turn out to be the MBR.