Hi PC crashed and would not reboot...said disk error. Rebooted with the floppy disk to the Dos prompt. This was my brother and since typing WIN gave no response he decided to use scandisk, which found loads of errors on the C drive. When it had finished ..it took ages.. the c drive contains nothing but folders named FILE00001 to FILE05608 (within these folders are the original files but all at random) The backup drive is unaffected so we can recover data. But what went wrong with the drive? Could it have been a virus...he had no virus checker. (I have run the disk through my PC and it came out clean) or just a corrupted disk in which case he will need a new one. Any thoughts? Steve

Difficult to say Steve. Kinda sounds like the FATs got currupted. But I can say that it was probably scandisk that created those File00XXs while attempting to fix the data.

man i had that same thing happen to me. the c: directory had like 1,000 filoooo's in it. i can't remember what i did to cause it, i think i was trying to fix a simple problem. and to be honest i cant remember what i did to fix it so i'm not much help there either. i probably reformatted the drive. but yea was truly a nightmare. just a note i keep telling everyone. i have a 6 gig hd that i have formatted to perfection and all my important programs loaded with internet, windows update, winzip, all the stuff you hate getting over and over when you format. and i keep it in a safe place. when my main hd's get loaded with trash or something goes wrong, iload the 6 gig make it master and have my problem hd as slave. reboot from my "template 6 gig" when windows loads, take everything i need off the messed up hd, then reformat. then from windows i do start run xcopy c:\*.* d:\/c/h/e/k/r with just one space after c:\*.* then in one click my perfectly formatted drive copies itself perfectly to the one i want to use. takes 15 minutes or so and i dont have to take anychances on formatting and loading drivers wrong or something and having to format again and again. if you have a small hd or even one you can set aside. and this 6 gig is old too but it totally works even on my newer hd's.

Exactly the same thing happened to me. One of the first things that went wrong a long time ago. What had happened was that the swap file had become cross linked, and scandisk ran all night and then everything was a complete mess, the FAT's were corrupt, and I could not boot. For me I believe it happened when the screen saver went on during a game. This was win 95, on a 486. I reformatted, and then it was ok.

With that many errors, I'm afraid that a fresh FDISK, FORMAT, Re-install is in the cards for you. There's virtually no possibility of trying to piece together the bits. That's what backups are for. You DO have one of your critical information, don't you? Sorry 'bout that .. Don