Yesterday I bought a gigabyte GA-7vaxp with 512MB ram from a friend which worked perfect in his system.

I have a Maxtor 160GB with
win 98 on the c: drive
win xp on the d: drive
and my own files on the e: drive.

An it's best when you put a new board into your system that you reïnstall your OS 's .So I fomated my c and d drive and placed win 98 and win xp back on it.This went all very well and when he asked to reboot or install a driver I did it without any problem.At a point I had installed my soundcard and wanted to test it so I tried to play a song but when I did that I saw that windows had renamed almost all my files (and not only the music files but also my folders and other data)and it gave them odd looking signs.

http://users.telenet.be/clandestien/probleem.jpg

Now, it's not possible anymore to get into the folders or open any file.

The remarcable thing is that only the files which I copied yesterday on a mini-reunion were renamed.

Does anybody know a way to recover these files?

The first thing that came into my mind was the program " GetDataBack "but in this case , were not actually speaking of overwrited data or a broken harddrive.

P.S: the partitions are all in FAT32

First off windows dosn't go around renaming things. Something has happened to the files/ folder for windows to show you those stage symbols.

Have you installed the correct language packs?

Other than that it seems to me that possible the boot sector or MBR have become corrupted and so you are seeing strange symbols. Have you tried running ScanDisk or a similar program. You could scan for bad sectors as well but I don't think it is that.

This however does seem a little odd. Were they all placed in the same directory?

Well it would seem that the files became corrupt, most likely because of the reinstallation of the OS. Unfortunately there is nothing you can do about it. Don't know exactly why it happened but they are unusable so just get rid of them if you can. If you can't just delete them then you are most likely going to need to reformat that drive.

No they were in diferent directory's but all on the same partition.

Even some which I placed as "hidden" were renamed.

I did what you said and now I have 54.6 GB of files with the name FILE0001.CHK . How can I put these back into regular files ?

Dude you got a virus better check!

I can't remember but I believe there is a way to turn the CHK files back into what they were. But like I said I can't remember how.

Try these,
http://www.ericphelps.com/uncheck/
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/chkmate.htm


WARNING
I have never used these programs it is just one two I found on the net. Read all instructions before use.

Thanks for all the help , I have recovered some movies but a lot is lost .What can I do to avoid it hapening again cause my dad who had 3 HD has had this a lot in the past.

Is it in the way I install my OS ?

I don't think so. As far as I know there is only one way you can get the O/S on the drive and get it to work.


Either burn some stuff to DVD or set up a raid aray on your computer.

I think U said that you put Win98 on 1 drive, WinXP on other Drive n Programs on another Drive..Please Correct me if i'm wrong!!
If i am Correct, when You Re-Formated those Drives n Re-Installed Both Os's, The Programs on the Other Drive Lost ALL their Registry Files so All those Programs became Corrupt...You'll have to Delete All them Progys n reinstall them......The Moral to this kind of story is This----Unless U know what you'r doing, Do NOT install Programs to a Different Drive!!....I Mean That, Honest...
You should have your Programs on C: with Win98 plus Programs on D: with WinXP...But Why have Both OS's these days, XP has a Compatable part for progys with probs....Best Bet is to Not Install programs that give U probs in first place..Forget 98 n stick with XP n put ALL Ur Progys in same partition, Works far better...

how did you format the drive?

Whoa that looks strange, It looks like you have some severe file system problems, are both drives FAT? FILE00*.CHK are file created by scandisk from lost file fragments theres usually not alot you can do with them unless you are a data recovery specialist. I would start off by checking your drive cables and jumpers, make sure your bios info is right because something is hosing your data. Also might try removing each IDE device off the chain and run scans on them seperately as single/master. Ive seen a bad cdrom throw out a hard drive and cause that.

Good luck