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Toilet Duck
09-03-2005, 01:53 AM
I don't... really know what's going on, so I can only give a short description.

I have two HDs, a Raptor and a WD-3000JD 250ish GB storage drive. Raptor for games, storage for storage. No RAID or anything.. just two seperate HDs.

Anywho, I had to format the Raptor a few weeks ago, and the storage came in handy. I reinstalled Windows, and poof, 250GB showed up at the correct size and everything, nothing missing. To be safe, I went and nabbed the WD Data Lifeguard thing and had it "fully enable support for large volumes". No issues.

But, now I have an odd problem. A little boo-boo with Creative Audio forced me to reformat again... so I intended to use the same system (format raptor, grab all the previously downloaded stuff off the storage drive to save time). Well, things went smoothely, except for one thing: One directory, just one, on the storage drive has gone wonky. It is now.. how to put this. The uppermost folder named "Defies Categorization" used to contain 3 sub folders, which were three old shoot'emups. Now, Defies Categorization contains Defies Categorization, which contains Defies Categorization.... about 14 times over, which then waaaaaay at the bottom of a folder trail, contains the stuff. The problem is, I can't delete ANY of it... it gives some error that even un-checking "read only" wont fix.

Luckily, it was probably the least important folder on the drive, and all of the drivers/movies/etc. are 100% fine.. but I'm a bit worried. How could reinstalling windows on a completely seperate drive cause corruption? Or, is this some odd interface issue where the new windows install is seeing 10 folders that don't exist? It's rather confusing.

Any advice would be appreciated.


Edit: A little more poking around revealed two things: I was right in stating that only that folder branch was affected, BUT the contents deep down in the repeated folders is still.. workable? At least, the readmes down there work.. huh.

Elledan
09-03-2005, 02:42 AM
You could put this storage drive in another system to see whether it's this Windows install which is at fault, or whether the filesystem on this drive has really been 'modified' (mutated?).

This is the first time I've heard of such a kind of FS corruption, though :)

DougLite
09-03-2005, 12:33 PM
SInce Ice Czar is very busy: Corruption 101

It is possible that some bizarre file system corruption occurred, and the folder was made a subdirectory of itself :eek: or something similar. Can you copy the data to a different folder and seal off the "black hole"?

Toilet Duck
09-03-2005, 02:50 PM
Hmm... I just tried recovering the stuff inside. A couple of the files were A-OK, namely the ones that used to be 1 folder in but not in other folders. The three games down there, though, are hosed. I tried deleting them, and it got about 50% through before giving some stupid message like "cannot delete 'music', file name too long" etc. etc.

So, I recovered the only semi-important stuff outta the directory, but there's still a hole.