XP Jumbled My Drive... Help?

I reinstalled XPHome last night on a system with two HDDs. I use one for my O/S, progs, files, etc. and the other strictly for storage/backup. Once my install was finished I noticed that the drive letter on my backup HDD was changed. This morning I booted the machine and XP told me (during the boot) that there were errors on my drive (the backup) and it needed to run a recovery/check. I then watched while a list of every file on the drive flew by. Every line the same except for the file name: "Recovering orphaned file {filename}". It took nine hours to get through them all but I was relieved to find everything in it's place when XP finally finished booting. Even the drive letter was back to normal. I've been crying like a baby when I realized that they were all corrupted. .exe's flash a quick DOS window, then nothing. Text documents of all kinds (.doc, .pdf, .txt) open but they're all gibberish. Mp3's are all mashed - nothing is what it's labeled as and parts of different files are mixed into one. Photos - 30 years worth - open as a red X or no preview available. Is there anything I can do? I know all the info is there (file sizes remain the same as they were) it's just all misplaced. Short of sending the drive off to a surgeon, are there any solutions to this? I didn't even touch the drive that got screwed - I only installed on my regular o/s drive... :cry:cry:cry

 

i believe it has something to do with the fact that your xp home doesn't recognize hard drives larger than 137gb. How old is the installer? does it have any of the service packs installed? if not, run windows update to get sp3 and see if that helps....

not sure exactly why this could be the case, but i found another post just like this one here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t56394.html

once you do that, you might want to run recovery console and the command chkdsk on the drive again.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307654

 

Thanks for the tips! It's an SP2 installer (old, but still takes the drive sizes). I ended up running some recovery software that fixed about 60-70% of the files. So far as updating XP, the machine in question has never touched the net - is there a way to download updates on my online machine and install on the other? Thanks again for the help!

 

if you install sp3, it will include all the updates from release. Otherwise you would have to download each individual update.
http://majorgeeks.com/Microsoft_Windows_XP_Service_Pack_3_d4323.html