Windows XP File System Issue

By yeoo_andy_ni
in Microsoft (Windows)

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yeoo_andy_ni

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Hi,

I've decided to ask on the forums here as I'm totally stumped as to what to do next.

A girl in work recently had her PC BSOD. Took the disk out and put it into an identical machine, but it did the same thing. So, I slaved it off the identical machine and was able to see that all the files/folders (bar 3) were hidden. Weird. So I unhid them and ran a chkdsk on it. No corruptions were found. I was now however able to boot from the drive in both computers. Before I removed the disk, I rebooted and cloned the drive using the Easeus disk clone application/tool.

Now, here's the stranger part. All the files/folders are date back to May 2011. So any work that had been done between now and then is gone, can't be seen or found. My first instinct was to send the disk away to a recover company as I didn't want to muddy the waters any by trying to recover files or folder and maybe messng the disk up any more. So off it went, and the report came back this week. All this recovery crowd can see from the disk is the May 2011 files, but nothing after. I know disk recovery companies are generally first class at recovering data from a drive or disk that has failed or died, but in this instance, even though I explained the situation to them, is there any chance that they have missed something? Is there anything I would be able to try, even on the cloned disk as it was a sector by sector clone, so it will be the same data I'm reading.

Cheers!

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https://www.neowin.net/forum/topic/1074419-windows-xp-file-system-issue/
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g0dzilla

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Are you able to boot the machine up using a Linux (Fedora etc.) or other Live CD (e.g. Hiren's Boot CD using Mini XP Mode) so that you can just view the raw hard disk files; not from within a Windows environment?

Are there any dump files in the C:\Windows\Minidump folder of her hard drive that can be analysed to work out what caused the Blue Screens? If it was because of a hard drive failure, then it's highly possible that the drive has many bad sectors where that missing data was being stored on and was not able to be recovered (worst case scenario!).

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