hi there - i was asked to do a simple cleanup (interior AND system cleaning) on a pc for a friend of a friend and upon running a defrag on his hard drive, which contained Millennium Edition (on a Compaq pc) the reboot showed "operating system not found", so i attached the Millennium hard drive to my XP computer to run a different defrag utility, but before anything happened, an automatic checkdisk started @ reboot (that i was not allowed any time to bypass) and this is the result : [IMG] http://img3.picsplace.to/img3/120/deletedwindowsfolder.jpg [/IMG] now the Millennium drive has been rendered useless i guess, but i was able to salvage the MS Money files (.mbf i think) but now they aren't accessible thru the new XP install (on a different drive) and they also try to convert to the .mny file extension - i have a 'customer' that is REALLY bent out of shape about the whole thing, and i have no idea what (if anything) can be done to salvage the financial info from his pre-existing files. when i run MS Money 2002 the username shows up correct, but there is NO information in the files it seems, even though there IS content in them (as indicated by different filesizes, etc.) Originally, the Compaq Recovery disk was tried, but responded to NONE of the options listed in it's index. HELP! lol thanks for browsing, every1 :)

Out of curiosity, what are the file systems of the drives in question? Soylent Green is PEOPLE!

You can try some recovery tools, hard to know what can be saved after all the weird stuff you did: DriveRescue is pretty good (and free). No longer supported but will pull stuff from deleted partitions. This is a direct download link: http://www.planetmirror.com/pub/majorgeeks/drives/rescue.zip or; http://www.woundedmoon.org/win32/driverescue19d.html You might also try DiskInvestigator (free): http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html PC Inspector (free) : http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm Restoration (free) : http://hccweb1.bai.ne.jp/~hcj58401/ . Best

the original file system was FAT32 (ME) and that was the system the original defrag was done on. the second system was NTFS (XP) and that is the system i connected the ME drive to once i removed it from the Compaq case in order to clean it's innards.