Data Recovery.

[Shishio]

Does anyone know anything about this?

I recently used O&O Professional to defragment my hard drives. It defragmented my first one fine, but the program crashed before it finished the second.

On my next boot, most of the files on the drive were gone, but according to Windows I still had the same amount of free space, which, to me, suggested that everything was still there, but that Windows could not read my drive properly for some reason. I have had this problem before, but the computer always worked properly again after a couple of reboots. I had no such luck this time.

So I booted with my Damn Small Linux live CD, and it read my hard drive properly, so I tried booting in Windows again, and I let CHKDSK run. (I usually cancel it because my computer once took 45 minutes to boot.)

This time, most of the files that had "disappeared" reappeared, and most of the files that were visible before were gone. And this is the way all of my Linux live CDs read the drive now.

On a later boot, (I have had this problem for almost a week now, I tried to fix it myself so I wouldn't have to bug others, but I have not been able to. I tried conducting a web search, and a search on Microsoft's support site, no luck there, either.) CHKDSK started deleting files, so I rebooted, and my computer still reads the drive as it did before.

I am hesitant to use the repair function on my install disk for fear that it will delete files as CHKDSK seemed to be doing.

The hard drive in question is a Western Digital 250 GB that I purchased this past Boxing Day. I am running Windows 2000 Professional. (Although it's installed on my other drive, this one is just for storage.)

[Smidge204]

Should go without saying, but do not modify, delete, add or move data on that drive. The NTFS volume is corrupted, but there is a good chance you can recover from it.

What you need is a tool to restore NTFS tables... unfortunately I can't think of any that are free :/ (Sorry I can't be more useful at the moment!)

And don't ever bother with CHKDSK. I've yet to see it actually fix anything outside of marking parts of the drive as "bad" so Windows won't read/write to them again.
=Smidge=

[setrict]

Lockup during defrag can really screw up a file system. Chkdsk is probably finding some invalid entries since defrag was in the process of shuffling around your data when it hung. If you have enough space, I'd try to copy all files over to a different drive, reformat, and copy them back. If you're really worried about the data, try a recovery tool.

Any of the decent recovery tools are going to be very expensive, but most have demos you can download that will atleast identify what files it -can- recover if you buy it (check ontrack.com for example). You'll need to do a raw recovery (since your file system can't be trusted), and the result will be a lot of unnamed, and unorganized files you have to shift through manually. Luckily most of the recovery software can atleast identify the common file types like doc, jpg, etc. MiniPE. Google.

[Shishio]

Unfortunately, while I can still open most files, I cannot move them from the drive for some reason.

Something about being unable to read from the drive because it's corrupted.

[Smidge204]

Googlin' around turned up "PC Inspector file recovery (http://www.snapfiles.com/opinions/PC_Inspector_File_Recovery/PC_Inspector_File_Recovery.html)." Word of caution, though: I haven't tried it myself. The worst two reviews were by a guy who FORMATTED his drive and another running Win98 (which is dodgy to begin with...) Overall user experience seems somewhere between mediocre and satisfactory.

Worth a try I suppose...

Edit: A technically non-inept friend of mine recommended this (http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/Back-Up-and-Recovery/Restoration.shtml). I'd try this first, then the PC Inspector thing if it doesn't work.
=Smidge=

[eMadman]

I typically use UBCD for any hard drive related issues. I believe you borked your partition table. Data recovery is possible, but I don't remember just which utility you'll need. UBCD should have you covered

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/