Data Recovery.

I recently used O&O Professional to defragment my hard drives. It defragmented my first one fine, but the program crashed before it finished the second.

On my next boot, most of the files on the drive were gone, but according to Windows I still had the same amount of free space, which, to me, suggested that everything was still there, but that Windows could not read my drive properly for some reason. I have had this problem before, but the computer always worked properly again after a couple of reboots. I had no such luck this time.

So I booted with my Damn Small Linux live CD, and it read my hard drive properly, so I tried booting in Windows again, and I let CHKDSK run. (I usually cancel it because my computer once took 45 minutes to boot.)

This time, most of the files that had "disappeared" reappeared, and most of the files that were visible before were gone. And this is the way all of my Linux live CDs read the drive now.

On a later boot, (I have had this problem for a week now, I tried to fix it myself so I wouldn't have to bug others, but I have not been able to. I tried conducting a web search, and a search on Microsoft's support site, no luck there, either.) CHKDSK started deleting files, so I rebooted, and my computer still reads the drive as it did before.

I am hesitant to use the repair function on my install disk for fear that it will delete files as CHKDSK seemed to be doing.

I would like to avoid backing up if possible, as I am unable to move files, (But I can open most of them.) and if I could burn them, it would take a really long time to burn 124 gigabytes of data.

The hard drive in question is a Western Digital 250 GB that I purchased this past Boxing Day. I am running Windows 2000 Professional. (Although it's installed on my other drive, this one is just for storage.)