MAJOR C r A s H

Mu puter went completely ape sh** and I lost alot of data. and completely lost a 20 gig hardrive. At any rate, I tried re-installing WinXP and ended up only Validating windows over the phone. Slowly, I started reinstalling System Stuff such as Java, and Framework, etc. It's running more stable now, but I am still having some problems. My recycle bin may as well not even be there.... the icon is there, but there is no letters under it, you can't open it, you can't right click it, you can't drag and drop on it. Why did my recycle bin cease to exist.

Also, I have 2 folders of the root that are random numbers and letters - I opened one up and it had a folder in it from a different drive that I no longer have, and I cannot open said folder. Everything is just mind-boggling. Any help would be appreciated.

Danny

 

a couple of questions:
did you re-install windows on the same hard drive? if so, your problem could be the hard drive, and no matter how often you re-install windows on it, you are going to have weird things happening

if you are sure the physical health of the drive is ok, while reinstalling windows, did you choose to format the drive, or just simply install windows over an existing installation. If that's the case, you will probably have 2 windows folders (i think one would be c:\windows, and another would be c:\windows.000 or something like that)