HELP! ALL ZIP DISK INFO IS GONE AND NOW "FOUND.000"!

[Lysimachus]

I have a disk with extremely important homework/assignments on it for college. I usually backup my data every now and then. However, my latest backup was not as soon as it should have been, therefore I believe I have lost some pertinent information.

I opened the disk only to find a minimal amount of Word files displaying, however no folders were displaying. I had a huge folder called "Homework and Assignments", and it's gone. All the word files that do display do not open and I get some window telling me to change the coding or something like that...looks like the format is messed up.

So I decided to go ahead and do scandisk and repair and fix all errors. After scan disk was done, a folder popped up on my disk called "FOUND.000"

I opened this folder only to find thousands of files such as "FILE000.CHK".

Is there any repair utility whatsoever that exists on the net that will restore all these files back to their original format???

Please oh please, you would save me a lot of headaches.

Thanx in advance.

 

[Lysimachus]

Is this the place I should be posting this? Or which forum of this site at anandtech should it be?

 

[dullard]

Yes this would be better off in another forum - but sadly only in Off Topic or General Hardware will you get a response anytime soon. I'm not an expert in these matters, but I've had similar problems. Generally if the disk just had a corrupted file name/location table, then the files are still fine. A simple scandisk can find those files, but since the name table was corrupted it won't know the names of each file. In fact, often it will know all the names except for the first letter. In any case, it has to make up a name for it, so your scandisk named them "FILExxx.CHK". As far as I know there is nothing you can do, but to manually inspect each file and give them their proper names. If the only thing wrong was that the names were lost, then you will be done after that. But if the names were corrupted AND the files are corrupted, then you are screwed.