Any way a directory can simply disappear on a hard drive?

[news.rcn.com]

I am having a curious problem which is that an entire working directory has
simply disappeared from my hard drive. It is in a subdirectory off the My
Documents folder in Windows XP Pro and I have been actively using it for
about seven years. Suddenly I cannot see it at all and cannot find any
reference to any common words (such as names) used in it when searching the
hard drive using XP's search function. Even more unusually, it has
disappeared in the last four weeks and I have my recycle bin protected by
Norton Systemworks. I haven't emptied the bin and can see all files which
have been deleted since about last January and it simply isn't there:
Neither the directory nor the files in that directory. My hard drive is
split into two partitions and obviously I have checked both of them and cant
find it anywhere.

I presume a crack on the platter with the directory in it woudl have shown
up as somehting worse than this? ANyone got any ideas on where it could be
or how I can restore it?

 

[Will Denny]

Hi

If the folder has been accidently deleted, you 'may' be able to recover it
with a 3rd party 'undelete' program, but over time the contents may very
have already been overwritten:

http://aumha.org/a/recover.php
http://www.executive.com/undelete/undelete.asp

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

Hi

If the folder has been accidently deleted, you 'may' be able to recover it
with a 3rd party 'undelete' program, but over time the contents may very
have already been overwritten:

http://aumha.org/a/recover.php
http://www.executive.com/undelete/undelete.asp

Both obviously don't apply.

 

[Connan the Stamp Collector]

I am having a curious problem which is that an entire working directory has
simply disappeared from my hard drive. It is in a subdirectory off the My
Documents folder in Windows XP Pro and I have been actively using it for
about seven years. Suddenly I cannot see it at all and cannot find any
reference to any common words (such as names) used in it when searching the
hard drive using XP's search function. Even more unusually, it has
disappeared in the last four weeks and I have my recycle bin protected by
Norton Systemworks. I haven't emptied the bin and can see all files which
have been deleted since about last January and it simply isn't there:
Neither the directory nor the files in that directory. My hard drive is
split into two partitions and obviously I have checked both of them and
cant find it anywhere.

I presume a crack on the platter with the directory in it woudl have shown
up as somehting worse than this? ANyone got any ideas on where it could be
or how I can restore it?

If you have been using it for 7 years I presume that mens the drive was
formated as FAT not NTFS and the OS has been upgraded at some point. If
that's the case I'd strongly suspect some form of disk coruption.

 

[J. Clarke]

I am having a curious problem which is that an entire working directory
has simply disappeared from my hard drive. It is in a subdirectory off the
My Documents folder in Windows XP Pro and I have been actively using it
for about seven years. Suddenly I cannot see it at all and cannot find any
reference to any common words (such as names) used in it when searching
the hard drive using XP's search function. Even more unusually, it has
disappeared in the last four weeks and I have my recycle bin protected by
Norton Systemworks. I haven't emptied the bin and can see all files which
have been deleted since about last January and it simply isn't there:
Neither the directory nor the files in that directory. My hard drive is
split into two partitions and obviously I have checked both of them and
cant find it anywhere.

I presume a crack on the platter with the directory in it woudl have shown
up as somehting worse than this?

A crack in a platter would have shown up as a loud bang followed by a rattle
as the head was physically ripped off of the positioner and then tossed
around the inside of the capsule. A crack in a platter in a disk is a
catastrophic failure.

ANyone got any ideas on where it could be
or how I can restore it?

Odds are that you accidentally dragged it into another folder--this is one
of the most annoying things about Windows--it lets you do this without
warning. Some folders are not searched by Windows Search even if you set
it to search hidden and system folders, so you might have to hunt for it
manually.

Failing that, it is possible that your directory structure has been
corrupted.