Hi, I just had a baffling problem at hand: while I was not watching, my 3-yr-old totally trashed one of my partitions. I didn't know what he did and could not think of a single way to accomplish what he did: That partition from the volume label to all the folder names and file names was totally renamed to illegal characters! All the names were from 0-255 range of ASCII characters though and seemed to be dominated by illegal characters. All the file time stamps were messed up as well ranging well over 100 years apart. While I'm pretty upset, but I do find the situation strange and interesting too. It just feels as if that my son somehow took a binary file and dropped in a system file table or something. Truly baffling. File sizes were all wrong (most range in 3-5 GB a file), folders cannot be opened and are reported 0 size in property tab. File system check gives "illegal first character in file name, truncate" to every folder and file. However, the partition total size and free space were reported right, not affected by the total size of those outlandish file sizes.
Here's some details of my system: two drives, master on primary IDE channel 60 GB. slave was the one with the problem. It has 3 partitions, the first one 10 GB, empty. 2nd one 70 GB, and is the one with the problem. 3rd one 80 GB, has my Win2k installed on it and was not affected. The 10 GB one also was weird after my son touched it. Windows couldn't read the size info for the partition and every time I open my computer it takes forever to show detail, and when it did, there's no size info for that 10 GB partition. I later fixed it by using the drive installation software to correct the drive size. But still have not found any idea how I could repair the 2nd partition. Will award point to suggestion that recovers data or pointer to a downloadable software that could recover the data (also willing to add another 500 points if reason for this problem is explained)
Thanks a lot!
