Confused Missing files and Data

[Fivehundred]

I have a new computer, had it for about 5 days. I backed my data up on my old one on a portable hard drive and installed all the files and folders on the new one, including the old folders.

Worked fine, had access to everything, all the photos opened Word files worked.

Today all the folders and all the files are gone. Obviously none of the shortcuts work. I can't find any of the individual files using windows explorer. They are not in the recycle bin.

I have Norton installed and its up to date, sdays I don't have a virus, Trojan or spyware, everything is fine.

Whats going on?

 

[Liam]

Did you copy like this?

old pc>external drive>new pc's hd?

Just wanting to clarify a bit before suggesting stuff.

Liam

 

[Fivehundred]

Did you copy like this?

old pc>external drive>new pc's hd?

Just wanting to clarify a bit before suggesting stuff.

Liam

Yeah, I backed up the files uncompressed onto the external drive and fro there copied them onto the hard drive on the new PC. I do obviously still have the files because they are on the old PC and the external drive, but I want to know whats going on.

The new hard drive shows 14Gb sitting on it, to be honest I didn't look what it had after I installed everything. 14Gb seems a lot for windows XP, Office, Autoroute and assorted drivers and photo software.

Everything seems to work just fine. Just no files and folders, stuff like TomTom files is still around, turbolister backup, but no spreadsheets, no photos, no word files, none of the folders.

 

[Liam]

Weird, what was the operating system of the old machine, could be that your new PC's OS won't read the files so they disappear.

Liam

 

[Fivehundred]

Weird, what was the operating system of the old machine, could be that your new PC's OS won't read the files so they disappear.

Liam

The old machine was running Windows 2000 which was an upgrade from Windows 98. The new one is running a factory install of XP. New PC is software came pre loaded. I was short of time and just went out and bought one.

Before I did it I did wonder if I'd have an issue with long file names, but the folders transferred no problem. No error messages, everything opened, changed stuff, saved it re opened it, sweet as.

Then this morning I had no My documents folder, no sub folders, No spread sheets, no word files, no images. All the programs like Word and Excell work, and it will read them off my USB flash drive.

I have Picassa installed and it picked up all the images in the computer's manual on the C drive, they're still there, the images in my photo files are all AWOL.

 

[Liam]

Sounds like your old pc had a Fat file system formatted HDD, think this is the problem, erm your upgrade to W2K would have kept readability but XP doesn't read one of the fat file systems only NTFS.

Have a looksie here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ntfs

Another thing could be a dodgy new HDD.

Liam

 

[Trancendental]

XP reads both FAT32 and NTFS if the Destination Drive was Formatted as FAT32 then copying them over from an NTFS drive to a FAT32 drive might cause certain security issues with files as in some options not being available.

But the files should still be visible.

There is a chance that the files were partially corrupted when they were copied over and then when windows rebooted it deleted the files as a result.

Try downloading a file recovery tool to see if they are still there.

I remember there being a old school basic virus that made out like your fiels had gone when really and truly it had them moved to a different location on the disk and changed the attributes of that location to hidden.

Virus scanners aren't good for much in my opinion.