Reinstall WinXP - Data drives messed up

[Agent 537]

I'm having a real ugly problem with XP right now. Here's the scoop.

My computer's got 3 hard drives: One "system" drive where I put all
the OS files and installed programs, etc, and two "data" drives. the
first data drive has all of my mp3s, the other is for storing movies,
important docs, etc. All three drives are formatted in NTFS and do
not have any hardware related problems with them.

I had Win XP home edition installed on the system drive. No problems
with any of the drives. Everything was running fine.

Then I bought Windows XP professional for business. Since all my data
that I cared about was stored safely on the data drives, I put the XP
disc in, had setup reformat the "system" drive, and successfully
installed winXP Pro onto the "System" drive. Didn't have setup touch
the two data drives at all.

After XP Pro finished its installation, I continued to install the
software that I had on there before like Office, WinAmp, etc.
Everything installed without any problems.

At first, I didn't see any problem. Windows sees the two data drives,
all the files appear in their correct folders and have the correct
filenames and file sizes. But then when I go to access the files on
the data drives, they are most definitely messed up. Most (but not
all) of my AVI (divx) movie files don't play anymore. (Windows Media
Player says its an unsupported filetype but they ALL played fine
before the change in OS).

With the files that DO still play.. they have serious issues.. Pieces
of one file are jumbled up with other files. I'll be watching a movie
file and it would have random frames from OTHER movie files from other
folders on the hard drive. Its hard to sit and watch Gladiator with
random frames of Zoolander popping in every few minutes.

I have NO idea how to fix this. The whole reason I put all my data on
separate drives was so that if the OS went bad I wouldn't lose my
data. Now its just mocking me..

I'm currently running a defrag on the movie drive to see if that fixes
things.
I probably shouldn't have started a defrag (or anything that would
alter the disk contents) before asking the experts but I panicked. So
if the defrag finishes and my data is still whacked.. I don't know
what to do.. argh.. !!!

Any help or advice or ideas would be much appreciated!
Thanks!

 

[Gerry]

Technically, your data should have been "SAFE". But
unfortunately windows doesn't live up to all that it
promises. Try copying some of the files to a cd and try
playing them on another computer. If they do, then
something is messed up on yours. If they still are messed
up playing on another system, then there's no cure. I've
learned the same type lessons the hard way as well. Now I
always back up stuff that I don't want to lose before I do
any system reformats or installations. Good luck.

 

[CS]

On 6 Jul 2004 12:01:21 -0700, (e-mail address removed) (Agent 537) wrote:

It's ugly alright. I hope you can recover your data. It sounds as if
the MFTs (Master File Table) were somehow corrupted on the two data
drives. I'm not sure they can be repaired but you might want to try
running chkdsk /f from a cmd.exe prompt to see if anything can be
fixed. Since the two drives were formatted as NTFS, it may be
possible to recover.

One thing I've learned is always disconnect slave drives prior to
installing a new OS on the boot system drive. What happened should
not have happened. Looks like Murphy's Law got to you.

 

[Plato]

Technically, your data should have been "SAFE". But

No so, not even in theory. Any OS install can wipe out old data in a
second. This is not new news.

unfortunately windows doesn't live up to all that it
promises. Try copying some of the files to a cd and try

This has nothing to do with windows. It's just a fact of life when
dealing with pcs with ANY OS.

 

[Agent 537]

After further investigation:

Ran chkdsk on both data drives as well as some other diagnostic type
programs (Norton Disk Doctor and Norton Speed Disk). Got some
interesting results

The movie drive had a bunch of NTFS indexing problems, which I then
had Norton Disk Doctor fix. The mp3 drive had no problems whatsoever.
I tried playing a bunch of the mp3s that were stored on there. The
files seem to be ok and intact. No clicking or other signs of
corruption.. Yay !

Then I started up Norton Speed Disk (Norton's version of defrag).
Analyzed the mp3 drive. I was surprised to find that the mp3 drive
was very organized and kept up. Especially since its been months of
use since it was last defraged. Only 0.08% fragmented. Maybe that's
what saved it.

The movie drive, however was a mess, some files had over 10k fragments
each. This may have had something to do with the problem. Maybe the
winXP setup doesn't know how to correctly work with highly fragmented
drives. Or maybe winXP just slipped up and rewrote the MFT just for
kicks..

So most of the movie drive is going to have to be purged. I'll run
DivFix on the AVI files and try to save what I can. It was mostly
older files that got messed up more since they most likely were stored
at the beginning of the drive and had more fragments. That's my guess
anyways.
I guess its ok, I'll just have to rip them from the DVD again so I
can watch them at work haha.

Lessons learned:
1. Disconnect data drives before reinstalling the OS
2. Might as well run a nice defrag on the data before reinstalling the
OS

 

[CS]

On 7 Jul 2004 11:07:31 -0700, (e-mail address removed) (Agent 537) wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. Looks like you have the situation well in