I have a very strange problem with a hard drive that in all my years of teching Im actually completely stumped.
Ill start from the begnning. I’ll refer to my old drive as F: (60gig fat32)and new as C:
(60gig ntfs) I used F: as my main drive with WinME before updating to WinXP which I installed on C:
For some reason (badly designed MB) I still ran F: as my master and c: as slave. This worked fine and Win XP installed ok no probs and I ran it for 1 year using F: for my backup files.
The other week I decided to reinstall WinXP because it was running slowly so I installed it over the old XP and updated to SP2. Now though any file or install that was done to F: drive from the WinXP has disappeared. The shortcuts on my desktop have the blank icon on them.
I can see all other files on the f: drive. I have tried looking at the drive from another comp, tried taking command of the folders and even wierder (which suggests its maybe something to do with partitions) all File Recovery software doesnt even see them. I know theyre all there because it registers as being full. The files were over 20gig so if they were deleted the drive wouldnt be full.
Im at a deadend now.. ive tried everything. The only strange thing that occured during the install is winxp created a new ‘user’ profile and ignored the ones already made and said some .dll wasnt installed but i think that was because it was over the old updated version.
If i really need i can transfer all the contents to a 320gig drive if i need to mess around with partitions etc
Does anybody know where these phantom files have gone?