Just yesterday i get this odd error msg saying my Win32 app or whatever has failed and i thought nothing of it and said not to send an error report. Then i get an odd window saying to save any material i have currently open as it will restart the computer in 30seconds. When the computer restarted, it went through scandisk for one of my 50 gig partitions. All of a sudden tons of errors pop up. I figure scan disk will fix these errors. So windows loads up and i'm looking at my 50gig partition. All 46gigs worth of data i have in the drive has been wiped out! It's as if it did a quick format or something on the parititon!!! How do i recover my missing files? Tried system restore...got nothing. Tried scandisk again. Says there's no errors (but bloody hell it deleted everything!!) tried Nortons DIsk Doctor. Says no problems. Tried Recover command in dos, nothing to recover. Any ideas on why the @*#$ scandisk would do something like that? The HDD is only 8months old and had 56% fragmentation from when i checked 2 days ago! If there's any way to undo the damage please let me know! thanks! NTFS file format Running on XP Sp1

I've never heard of Scandisk deleting that kind of data like that, but I'll guess at what happened. You had a lot of errors on your drive and you set Scandisk to automatically fix errors. My guess would be that Scandisk deleted the data that was associated with the errors. With 56% file fragmentation, it sounds like you have bigger problems than Scandisk deleting your files. I've never had mine get above 4 or 5%. Computer maintenance, Grasshopper. Very important. -=Bryan=-

so basically no recovery available? that kinda blows...

Well... There is recovery software available out there. I don't have any links to them off-hand. I'm sure someone will. But depending on what exactly ScanDisk did, or if/how your partition was formatted, it's possible that you can't recover the data. -=Bryan=-

well i'd sure like to get a hold of that software! I think it was like an indexing problem or something... I don't understand how it could be so major considering i was accessing stuff in that drive with no issues in the first hand.

Im-bloody-possible! Your drive must have had a major problem with it. There is no way Scandisk can alter your disk partitions... delete errors yes but alter structure NO!

Early... If you look at the original post more closely, Scandisk DIDN'T alter the disk structure. It altered the data within the structure. And you're absolutely correct, Scandisk cannot alter actual partitions. -=Bryan=-