Hi all Maybe I should have posted this in Dos but I think more people read this so I am hoping someone can help.. my wife’s HD crashed last weekend without warning. She had one HD with one partition as XP PRO and another logical drive D for storing stuff on. I had told her to use that to back up her files periodically in case the OS messed up with Viruses and stuff. .. well I really didn’t plan on the HD failing. (my fault).. she either got a vicious Virus or the HD itself truly failed. What happened is this. I went to turn on her Pc over the weekend and when it booted up. Instead of getting the POST info. I got a strange black window and a white stripe at the bottom slowly loading. Almost like a windows 2000 screen. I just let it sit like that to see what would happen and finally after about 10-15 minutes it SLOWLY loaded into XP.. But all these programs were failing like Norton Antivirus Etc.. .. since I figured the OS was messing up due to whatever. I tried going online to do an online virus scan and it started but after a minute or so even that shut down. So I knew at least the OS was in trouble. .. I finally figured that I had better save the stuff on the D drive and try to burn it to CD.. but when I went to my computer. The D drive was gone. I mean the D letter was there but when I clicked on it.. it said it needed to be formatted.. .. long story short. I tried reinstalling the OS over itself and that didn’t work . it kept saying it was unable to find files or copy them. I tried recovery and that didn’t work. So I figured all the info on the drive was just toast. As a last effort I finally attached another slave drive to the Pc .. one that could have stuff copied to it as it had a logical drive on it.. and I rebooted and did Fdisk. I managed to do an xcopy to copy all the stuff on the D drive over to the spare drive. But as you know. DOS truncates all the folder names to I think 8 characters as well as files themselves… my ?? is this. Is there any way to “untruncate” them once I am back in XP .. or am I stuck just having to rename all the folders and files again?? oh just as fyi. I also had thought maybe there was a loose connection to the original HD and that was causing the issues so I unplugged everything and plugged it all back in as well as tried running scan disk but none of that worked either. Scandisk always seemed to get hung up as well. That’s besides the point though as I have saved the files.. they are all just truncated with the little ~ in the file and folder names. Any ideas?? Thanks DJ

>> I tried going online to do an online virus scan >> That was your first mistake. On-line Virus scans are worse than useless. The only way to do a virus scan is with an application installed on the computer and then preferably in safe mode with no Internet connection. To do an on-line virus scan you are giving the remote computer complete and total access to your computer. You might as well broadcast a message all over the Internet, "Here I am, come and hack me!" You should get a decent anti virus application like AVG, install it and do a proper virus scan without an Internet connection. Copy XP files to DOS will always truncate them to conform with the DOS 8.3 filename convention. Once the files are in DOS, there is no way to recover the original long file names. It should not truncate the file though. Stuart

ok thanks stuart. i appreciate it. as for the online virus scan. that was simply a desperate last ditch attempt. i had tried using norton sysworks disc and rebooted the Pc and tried to have it scan before it got into any system and even that hung. .. every time it rebooted it got worse . and i was unable to get into safe mode. i knew that it was in bad shape when it took so long to get into XP.. and as long as i was in there. i tried to do the online scan. but the next reboot didnt allow me to get into safe mode or anything else. so thats why. but thanks again..