"Heavy G" wrote in message
. ..
Sorry this is a computer geek question not necessarily a electronics
repair type. but I figured this would be the best place to ask with all
the knowledgeable people here....


Ok I was installing a printer driver on a computer (HP pavilion, 450 mhz,
quantum bigfoot hard drive, running XP pro)
and for some reason I got an error and it gave me a blue screen saying ti
couldnt read from the cd and there was an error or something, and then was
checking files and said there were bad files and converted the lost chains
to files. NOW when I rebooted after this error the drive is "empty"
meaning all the windows files and folders are not there. I suspect they
were not deleted but something happened to the drive that they are missing
in action. doing a chkdsk shows the drives capacity and the used and free
space. its a 8gb drive and shows a little over 1 gig free.... when I put
the drive in another windows machine as a slave to look at it. the same
thing, no folders or files. there are however 2 folders with file names
FOUND.000 and FOUND.001 I assume these are the lost chains that were
converted to files. so what I ned to know is... what the hell happened,
and is there a way to recover any actual data? I dont care about
restoring it to boot windows. I just need to get documents, and settings
for IE and some email client settings of it. I already set up another
computer with XP thats a fresh install. but I want to recover the
important stuff off the old drive so I can copy them to the new system. is
there any hope???? thanks in advance!

Clone the hdd and then analyze the clone for the data.
Set the defective drive safely aside and do not spin except to clone.

There are many cloning software apps available, some are free.