hi everyone,

i have experienced data loss again and now i am felling sick of using computers.
A few weeks back some 2-3gig data disappeared off my 'D drive'. that time it was mostly some games and photoshop stuff so i thought it must have got deleted accidentally and recovered it using power data recovery software.

but today again the same thing happened and its 'D drive' again
This time i lost some confidential files i had brought home from office.
I think its something to do with the partition having problems.

i have a 160gig hdd

http://img145.imageshack.us/img145/531/20090301003803.jpg

i havent used the linux partiton after i formatted my windows for a long time now...can that be a reason?
I have now defraged the drive and checked for errors using chkdsk


anyone had a similar experience or could guide me to prevent the same thing happening in future?
i dont want to invest in RAID at the moment

Hey, maybe this will help. I'm using a RAID in mirror configuration, and it worked fine during some time. But it was strange some days ago that there were occasions it didn't work correctly and it had to rebuild the mirror frequently.

Eventually, the reason was found by analyzing for errors the surface of one of the disks with HD Tune tool, and it found the first sector damaged. So the conclusion could be: a RAID with a damaged sector in any of the disks will be a high risk of loosing data. I will change the disk by a new one.

By the way, don't change the configuration of the RAID, since this eliminates all partition data of disks! If you do it, the only way to access all data of disks will be by recovering raw data (what I'm unfortunately doing just now with GetDataBack tool, and ALL has been recovered properly without existing any partitions information).

I hope this will help... Good luck.

Nacho_dj

The real problem there is that thingy called "NTFS" in the first column called Partition. Well, I really don't know any good windows compatible file system to solve this problem.

I know that there is nothing to do with you "haven't used the linux partition". It's most likely to be a hardware problem which NTFS won't know how to handle correctly. The faster way to solve it is to buy a new disk and don't keep important things in this disk (not just D partition).

* Do they appear as 'deleted', have you investigated how they 'look like'?
* Nah. Linux was my saving anchorage when the nastiest, hidden bug of NTFS caused all windows version (2k->UBCD) to hard-fault reading my NTFS partition... Linux NTFS layer is better than M$ one sssh! ;P
* Did it show any error that could give you any clue? Did you perform an intensive surface test for weak sectors? Usually a partition problem means whole partition problem, so I do not think that it is the partition data by itself.

Have you hard-powered off windows? There can be a million of possible causes to your problem, you'd investigate more about. Oh, just because "it can always happen"even to reversers, have you checked with your AV?

Sorry guys for replying late. i was out on a long vacation.

thanks Nacho_dj but i don't have a RAID and using GetDataBack tool didn't help much.

@fungos : my hdd is a new one


yes it appears deleted since i was able to partially recover data. Unfortunately most of the important data was corrupt including most .doc and .xls files


yeah even i thought it couldn't be because of linux


No error at all. Some folders just disappeared
i didn't perform intensive surface test for weak sectors since i wasn't aware of it.
i did check for bad sectors but there weren't any(its a new hdd). i could defrag it without any problems(there wasn't a lot of fragmentation)


havent check with an AV as yet since i havent installed one but i am sure i dont have any shit on my comp

i havent investigated the matter a lot and now will just keep my fingers crossed and hope it doesnt happen next time