I have an E-Machine, 2.6 Ghz, 80 GB hard drive, 512k Ram, 56k modem, Windows XP, Home Edition, Service Pack 2, bought in Nov 2003.
My problem began when I deleted a Linux partition from my hard disk using the Windows XP Computer Management utility. It not only deleted the Linux partition, but every partition after that as well, including my g: partition. After many weeks of searching for free software to get the partition back, I finally succeeded. However, although I was able to access two of the three main directories I had on g:, it would not allow me to access the third directory. I could cd into it, but when I did a "dir", nothing came back, not even the information that their was a directory there. I also downloaded many, many free file restore utilties, but none of them worked very well. When I logged in, the system ran CHKDSK and gave zillions of error messages saying "bad sector found, deleting sector", so I was afraid to let it continue. Hesitantly, eventually I let it run, and all my files were finally restored. It was a miracle. These files are very large, and yesterday, after spending six hours organizing and sizing them in order to backup onto 12 cd's, after creating super directories and moving the other directories into them, suddenly I could not longer access them! It said, "Access denied". I tried "attrib" and nothing. I cd's into the subdirectories, but when I tried to "dir" their subdirectories, it said "No file(s) found." I logged in as Administrator and ran CHKDSK, but it fixed nothing. I downloaded FixMbr, but I am afraid to run it, because it might just drop anything that doesn't look kosher and the files will be lost forever. Any suggestions? Help!! Does anybody have a clue as to what is going on? If I even knew that, it would help.
