Every folder intact.. all files GONE!!

[pugsport]

4 year old medion laptop boot message "no operating system". I Boot to BIOS, hard drive isn't found, I boot with my vista disc select repair, message "need hard drive drivers". Explorer box pops up, I navigate to C drive go through a dozen folders, no files any where, every folder that should be there is there, but all are empty, apart from some that have a single batch file! So what's going on?
I have heard of certain virus's that can "trash" a hard drive, but for every single file to be missing, (or could they be hidden?) have any of you come accros this? A little research found this gem! Not quite the same thing.



They have lost their restore and driver discs, not sure if the original restore partition is even still there, I really wanted to take it with me for further investigation, I just love "getting my teeth" into this sort of thing!

 

[iisjman07]

The drive didn't appear in the BIOS but you can access it from a winpe environment? That doesn't sound right... Have you done any diagnostics on the hard drive?

 

[PC Ops]

I ran into something similar recently. Even when slaving the hdd on another Windows machine: nothing. But when slaving it to a Linux I found everything. Copied data, reinstalled machine, etc.

 

[pugsport]

The customer is thinking about their next move, I wanted to investigate further, no fee, just for my own curiosity. They gonna call me Monday if they want me to look into it further. I'm really itching to look at this!

 

[red12049]

4 year old medion laptop boot message "no operating system". I Boot to BIOS, hard drive isn't found, I boot with my vista disc select repair, message "need hard drive drivers". Explorer box pops up, I navigate to C drive go through a dozen folders, no files any where, every folder that should be there is there, but all are empty, apart from some that have a single batch file! So what's going on?
I have heard of certain virus's that can "trash" a hard drive, but for every single file to be missing, (or could they be hidden?) have any of you come accros this? A little research found this gem! Not quite the same thing.



They have lost their restore and driver discs, not sure if the original restore partition is even still there, I really wanted to take it with me for further investigation, I just love "getting my teeth" into this sort of thing!

Did that Explorer window open to allow you to choose a driver for the HDD controller?

Rick

 

[pugsport]

Did that Explorer window open to allow you to choose a driver for the HDD controller?

Rick

Yes it did, you know something? or am I missing something?

 

[red12049]

Yes it did, you know something? or am I missing something?

That explorer dialog, by default, limits you to finding file types that it is looking for (*.sys, for example). It won't display anything else, so all your folders look empty.

If you drop to the command prompt and do a *dir*, or use file explorer, I'm pretty sure your files will be there.

Sounds like you have an MBR or partition problem, off the top of my head.

Rick

 

[Banyon]

Had an issue similar to this on my home PC a while back with an old HDD.

As much as I would love to take credit for fixing it... all I did was slave the drive to my Windows 7 box, it could see it, then it popped up "scan for issues?"

I went ahead and let it scan, BOOM.... everything was back where it was supposed to be and it even booted and ran fine for a few more months (then needed to be buried due to old age).

Seems was just a MBR/MFT issue, but Seven fixed it in about 20 minutes.

 

[joydivision]

Had an issue similar to this on my home PC a while back with an old HDD.

As much as I would love to take credit for fixing it... all I did was slave the drive to my Windows 7 box, it could see it, then it popped up "scan for issues?"

I went ahead and let it scan, BOOM.... everything was back where it was supposed to be and it even booted and ran fine for a few more months (then needed to be buried due to old age).

Seems was just a MBR/MFT issue, but Seven fixed it in about 20 minutes.

I've had a few dying drives like that before which some how Vista magically got working. Worked enough for me to copy all the data before it died.