Twice in the past week upon rebooting I have lost data. All of the data, in fact, on my second physical hard drive on my computer. Upon rebooting, Windows XP ran check disk and indicated it was recovering files. Upon rebooting, I found that most of my (Seagate) drive had lost it’s data. I did find many of the files in a hidden folder named file.000, or something like that. There were a number of folders in that directory with .chk extensions that contained much of the lost data. The first time I was able to move much of the data back to the drive's root directory. The second time it happened -- about four days later -- I found most of the folders in a directory named file.001 (I “think” that was the name anyway – or something close). When I tried to move those files back to the root directory of the drive, it confirmed that they were moved, but when I tried to access them I got an error message telling me the files were not accessible. I've tested the drive with Seagate utilities. Says the physical drive is fine. I've run Norton's online antivirus scan which says my computer is virus free. Presently the drive is at a local computer repair shop. They're trying to recover my data. My question is, what's causing this? No virus, HDD is fine. Primary HDD tests out fine as well. I don't want to only recover my data: I want to stop this from happening (TWICE in the past week!). The only thing I can remotely identify (but I don't understand the connection) is that I had installed drivers for a firewire audio outboard box (MOTU 828MkII), after which the system crashed and my problems began. PLEASE help me here. I'm stumped. I found a fairly similar post on this site about a year ago (Here: http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/... but no solution is ever posted. Thanks, Tergin

Boy, try that link again... It is: http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/...

What service pack is installed and what size is the harddrive?

Windows Service Pack 2, and it's a Seagate 160 GB HDD... Tergin

Was SP2 on the CD when WinXP was installed?

No, it wasn't. I had an older version of XP that came with the PC, and I installed SP2 from the free upgrade CD sent directly by Microsoft. And of course I have kept up with the online automatic updates as well... TB

Watch the Screens at startup to see how the BIOS report the size of your HDrive. I think you may have an issue with 48bit LBA compliance. Look at the links below for more info. http://www.48bitlba.com/index.htm http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303013