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!