Earlier this week I was reformatting one of my hard drive partitions and reinstalling windows xp pro on it. Before i formatted this harddrive, i took all my documents and put them on a separate partition so they would get deleted, just like i do everytime before i reformat a partition. Anyways, all was fine for the time being and I installed Windows xp Pro. As soon as that installed I immediately ran windows update and installed service pack 1. When I restarted my computer, what I think was CHKDSK ran, and automatically answered YES to any question it was asked. One of these questions was something about the folder in which all my documents I wanted to save were in and it concluded with the question "Convert Folder to File? (Y/N)" and since I suppose it was setup to automatically say yes (note that I did not tell it to say yes to anything, it did this on its own), it said yes and bamo, when XP loaded, my folder was now turned into a small 32Kb file instead of a folder with all my documents. Is there any way that I can restore this folder and its contents? Or are they lost forever? I've searched microsoft and most of the web for anything relating to this and I can't find anything. Any Help would be appreciated.

i'm afraid your files are history (or a heap of 32k garbage) ... before you do this again, backup your files ... cd-r, flash stick, zip ... whathaveya ... even if i have 2 drives in a pc i disconnect the 2nd one when i repair/reinstall os ... i had my 32k experience too :-) ... whatever is valuable or vital doesn't get near xp until it's not up and running 'perfect' Today's subliminal thought is: 'Calm down ... it's only ones and zeros.' icq 10183575

I found a little more information while searching the net some more, and I found how to access the log of the chkdsk, so I figured I could post that here and maybe that would help some. Checking file system on E: The type of the file system is FAT32. One of your disks needs to be checked for consistency. You may cancel the disk check, but it is strongly recommended that you continue. Windows will now check the disk. Volume Serial Number is 4017-9863 Unrecoverable error in folder \My Documents. Convert folder to file (Y/N)? Yes Unrecoverable error in folder \Leadtek Drivers. Convert folder to file (Y/N)? Yes Unrecoverable error in folder \System Volume Information\_restore{77CDC39B-7F34-4294-B414-537EBA500C7F}. Convert folder to file (Y/N)? Yes Convert lost chains to files (Y/N)? Yes 436800 KB in 4536 recovered files. Windows has made corrections to the file system. 138020800 KB total disk space. 2784 KB in 57 hidden files. 31168 KB in 965 folders. 122643840 KB in 21655 files. 15342976 KB are available. 32768 bytes in each allocation unit. 4313150 total allocation units on disk. 479468 allocation units available on disk. Hopefully this will help some