Okay, so I have an external harddrive (1tb) which has about 300 gigs of media on it. I was running TuneUp Utilities 2009 and one of the things it suggested was running disk scans of all the hard drives. I restarted the computer as instructed, and when it rebooted it started a disk scan of G: (the external HDD) as expected. It got to about 7%.

My common sense then hurled itself as far away from me as it possibly could and I decided to cancel the scan and run it another time when I didn't need the computer. So, I turned off the computer using the power button. Turned it back on, no problems, except half of the data on the external HDD is messed up. Same amount of space used up on it, but half of the folders all the contents are garbled. Folders and files that can't be deleted because the names are too long/invalid, all SCREWED up.

Fortunately, the other half of it seems alright. So...I'm willing to cut my losses and copy off the unharmed stuff and format the G: DRIVE, but first I wanted to know if there was anything I could possibly do to salvage the rest of it.

Thanks in advance Be VERY VERY carefull, running third party programs on your hard drives and/or registry.
The most carefully written and tested programs in the world are from Microsoft.
Many other programs are NOT fully tested on all types of systems and can go OH SO horribly wrong on CERTAIN systems.

A highly touted program called the "Defraggler" has run on HUNDREDS of systems, maybe thousands with NO problem, but on MY own system it screwed up the boot sector so badly that I had to reset my system onto a brand new drive and I've spent the last month or more migrating files from that messed up drive to my new one.

Run Microsoft's own CHKDSK on that drive and see if that will straiten it out.

Good Luck,
The Shadow Quote from: TheShadow on December 25, 2008, 04:45:06 PM

Be VERY VERY carefull, running third party programs on your hard drives and/or registry.
The most carefully written and tested programs in the world are from Microsoft.
Many other programs are NOT fully tested on all types of systems and can go OH SO horribly wrong on certain systems.

A highly touted program called the "Defraggler" has run on hundreds of systems, maybe thousands with NO problem, but on MY own system it screwed up the boot sector so badly that I had to reset my system onto a brand new drive and I've spent the last month or more migrating files from that messed up drive to my new one.

Run Microsoft's own CHKDSK on that drive and see if that will straiten it out.

Good Luck,
The Shadow

Sorry, should clarify, it was the computer scanning, not a 3rd party program. the 3rd party program told the computer to reboot and run the scan. The scan happened once it rebooted and before it started up Vista.

Quote

Sorry, should clarify, it was the computer scanning, not a 3rd party program. the 3rd party program told the computer to reboot and run the scan. The scan happened once it rebooted and before it started up Vista.

Sounds like a contradiction to me. You have a third party utility installed and it's what prompted the restarting to run an scan. Are you saying TuneUp Utilities 2009 started a standard Microsoft scan, i.e. CHKDSK, rather some scan of it's own? How do you know that?