Files "disappear"

[Michael]

My computer hang and restart automatically while I was doing my work. After it restart, one of my drive (partition) has became "empty" - it only display the Recycle folder. Suspecting I lost all my files, I notice that the free space are remaining the same as before i.e. 1.78GB out of 12.40Gb, which means my files seems to be still there. I check with Norton's System Information and found out that there are a lot of scandisk files (File0000.chk - File3197.chk) which the total size is the same as my files i.e. 10.62GB. It seems like my files has turned into those scandisk files. What had happened? Any solution to recover my files? Thanks for answering!

[Flame]

Do you have virus protection software installed?

[glb]Flame[/glb]

[Michael]

Yes, Norton Antivirus 2004.

[gussery]

.chk files are created when you run a scandisk type utility and it finds bad pointers in your FAT table (the actual name depends upon you file system).  Since it cannot determine exactly where these file start or stop or what their names are it does it's best to write them out the way it believes they should be.  If you need to recover them then you have to open them one by one, determine what type of file they are, or think they are, rename them appropriately including extensions.  

Sometimes these are caused by bad sectors on the hard drive, sometimes by something deleting your File Allocation Table, sometimes by a power fluctuation, sometimes by a hard drive going bad, sometimes by a drive controller going bad.........................

Good Luck,

Gary

[Michael]

Gussery, thanks for your info.
But how am I gonna rename them? I couldn't even see the files in windows. I can only see them in Norton's System Information, and I cannot do anything i.e. cannot edit the files when the application displaying files on the drive...