think that a badly set pagefile might have corrupted gigabytes of
data.
I am using a multiboot system with a couple of XPpro installations plus
one XP64.
The XP64 system is used rarely (as I can't find the right drivers).
It might be possible that I'd decided (a year or so ago) to set the
pagefile folder of the XP64 in a common logical FAT32 drive set for
data only.
On retrospective, I think that such decision (mixing pagefile and data)
was a really bad one. It was supposed to be only a temporary move, but
I forgotten to set it right.
Anyhow, I've recently accessed the XP64 partition (after many months)
and the system notification tells me that the Data partition
(accessible from all operative systems) is getting out of space and
offer the option of deleting irrelevant data including temporary,
recycled and indexing files.
I opted to delete such "redundant" data (not more that a couple of Mb)
and then when trying to open files in the Data partition I was shocked
to find out that most of the data had gone! In fact there was a file
that shouldn't have been there: that blasted Pagefile!
I checked the pagefile menu and realized that yes I had set that
pagefile in that Data partition. Trouble is, I forgot about it and
deleted the same file when using XPpro(32bit) without updating the
settings in XP64.
The file in question is about 1.5gig while the partition is about
10gig. The free space was less than a gigabyte (couldn't contain the
pagefile) now I've got 8.5gig of free space!
I think that the pagefile have corrupted the partition.
Then after a quick ckeck on several web groups I find something about
"pagefile attack" "virtual OS running on XP64 and Vista64" and "blue
pills"? So, having only recently connected via broadband I am not
excluding a malware attack.
A quick check with several undelete data salvage software suggest that
most of the data is still there but when trying to recover, I get
unreadable text messages and corrupted exe applications.
I think the data is lost, but it would be useful to understand what
happened.
What's going on?
|
Similar Threads
