| 7191 |
2000-11-22 01:31:00 |
Recently a friend asked me to look at his rather sick (crashed all the time) Toshiba Libretto 70CT, running Win95. Inspecting his hard drive I noticed a large number of folders called dir001, dir002, etc. The contents of these folders appeared to be sub-folders with corrupt names containing visited internet sites. I also noticed the HDD was mis-reporting its size as 2.1GB rather than its actual 1.5GB. I decided to run Windows scandisk (thorough check, fix automatically) and then to defragment the HDD as I suspected serious corruption of data had occured. The laptop has an internet connection, but it had up-to-date anti-virus software running. After running scandisk for at least two hours, the laptop reported that it had restarted 20 times, and had run out of memory. I quit scandisk, and then... I noticed that the start/programs had no contents, that windows explorer wouldn't launch and any attempt to start a program of the desktop short cut produced an error. To cut a long story short, rebooting failed (insert system disk...) and on booting up to DOS on the emergency disks I had, I could see (mis-reported) content in three massive exactly same sized files. All had corrupt file names (machine language, i.e. a`>> etc.). I suspect that somehow scandisk corrupted the FAT table, but how? Does scandisk do this? Is this a 'feature' of Scandisk? Can you recover the lost data headers? I spent two embarrassed days over the weekend labouriously re-building my friends laptop,finding the correct drivers, etc. (thank God for driversguide.com - the greatest web site of them all). Although this saved my friendship, I still lost the email address book and two years worth of word docs (not backed up, of course)I would really like to know why this happened... Any help would be appreciated
Tom Semmens |
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