Disappearing files

[nick101181]

Hello.

I am running windows xp pro and have around 150 gigs of mpeg2 satellite captures on my 250 gig sata drive. I was looking at one of my folders that had 30 gigs of video in it and went I pressed back on the windows explorer window, all my videos from that folder disappeared. I believe they have disappeared for good because I had 14 gigs free space and now I have 42 gigs free. How could this have happened and how do I prevent it from happening again? I didn't press delete or anything, is there any hope of recovering them? I did not have system restore running at the time


thanks

[Dv8ted2]

More information is needed...

When is the last time that you did a virus scan?

This sounds like a virus.

[redwudz]

Have you rebooted? They may show up again. If you don't add anything to the drive, you may be able to recover your files.

Could be your HD index messed up. You could try running 'Error checking' on the drive from the properties window. With large drives, it will take a while.

Worst case, your HD may be failing. Or you might want to run some virus/trojan scans.

[nick101181]

well I'm pretty sure I don't have a virus, it's just that when i pressed the back button they disappeared. someone said that maybe it deleted it because it was too big to fit in the recycling in so maybe if i use a data recovery program it will convert what windows thinks is free space back to my files. I have rebooted and restarted plenty of times and even did searches but to no avail.

[Dv8ted2]

well I'm pretty sure I don't have a virus, it's just that when i pressed the back button they disappeared. someone said that maybe it deleted it because it was too big to fit in the recycling in so maybe if i use a data recovery program it will convert what windows thinks is free space back to my files. I have rebooted and restarted plenty of times and even did searches but to no avail.

For it to be in the recycle bin to begin with, you would have had to press delete.

Unless you have some sort of malicious file, such as a virus or a rootkit, files do not usually delete themselves.

As Redwudz suggested, try running chkdsk and look for errors in the filing system.