Win XP suddenly won't start on my machine. The machine just boots halfway to the starting Windows screen, then reboots again. I backed up my data to a Dual Layer DVD+R. Then I repartioned and formatted my drive.
The files on the backup DVD are valid files, with valid filenames and sizes, but none of them will open. I can copy the files to my hard drive with no errors with the files themselves, but JPEGs won't open in any image viewer and the DOCs won't open in Word, etc.
The Windows reinstall worked successfully, so the drive isn't dead, and it's obviously taking new files ok. (Used about 2 GBs of the 20GB) The thing that confuses me is that I ran some recovery utilities against the drive and they pick up some files with valid names and sizes...but 100% of them are also blank. Usually, you only get some files (whatever you haven't overwritten) when you run a drive utility recover, but the few files you get you can usually open some.
I just don't understand what happened.
2006-12-14 10:26:36 · 2 answers · asked by ed968 1 in Computers & Internet ➔ Hardware ➔ Desktops
If you tried to make the backup after you encountered the problem, your files may have been corrupted. It's critical that you are very careful about how you attempt to correct a problem. Most of the time, those attempts will lose you data.
There is a place on the hard drive called the FAT table, it basically tells windows where the files are stored on the drive. If the FAT was corrupted at the time of the backup, then the directory may show correct information, but they may be pointing to the wrong place on the drive. When you backed it up, you may have been backing up the wrong thing. The file names and sizes may appear correct, but the data it pointed to was lost.
It would have been better to give the drive to a tech before you had wiped it. The data might have been recovered.
The only thing you can do now is give the files to a tech and see if he can confirm the files are corrupted.
2006-12-14 11:22:26 · answer #1 · answered by The Psycho 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You don't have the needed RAM space. (if your hard drive only has 20GB of memory that's way to less. it should be about 160GB or more for XP)
2006-12-14 10:34:33 · answer #2 · answered by Keo C. 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋