ALL DATA LOST ???? HELP "bad links in lost chain at cluster"

Hi,

I am running WinXP on an nforce AMD XP1700 system. I am using it as
a storage computer. I have 3 harddrives - a small 40gb with the OS and two
others (80gb and 250gb). The 80gb was almost full (under 500mb left) and the
250gb drive had 150gb of files on it. For some DUMB reason i decided to copy
all the files from the 80gb drive to the 160gb. It said that it would take
about 130minutes. When I came back 4 hours later, the computer had locked up
(trying to copy the same file over and over - had copied about 80% of the
files). I could not stop the process - only option was to reboot.

When I rebooted, scandisk took over. For the last 2 days I have a scrolling
message on the screen that says "bad links in lost chain at cluster
********* corrected" (last check is was at 4,900,000 and counting).
Sometimes there is a line where the word "truncated???) is at the end of it.
I had read a couple of places on the web that mentioned that 160gb
harddrives had either 4.1mb of clusters (can't be true since I am at 4.9mb)
or 41mb of clusters (which means the computer has another 37mb more to go -
or another 18 days - YUCHHHHH).

If I were to stop the process, would the only files lost be the ones that I
was trying to copy from one drive to another? Would the files that are on
the 80gb be OK? Would the files that were on the 250gb drive originally
(100gb) be OK? Would the only ones that would be toast be the ones that were
to be copied? Would they be converted to chk files?

HELP HELP HELP!!!!!

spk

"lionking_x" wrote in message
Hi,

I am running WinXP on an nforce AMD XP1700 system. I am using it as
a storage computer. I have 3 harddrives - a small 40gb with the OS and two
others (80gb and 250gb). The 80gb was almost full (under 500mb left) and the
250gb drive had 150gb of files on it. For some DUMB reason i decided to copy
all the files from the 80gb drive to the 160gb. It said that it would take
about 130minutes. When I came back 4 hours later, the computer had locked up
(trying to copy the same file over and over - had copied about 80% of the files).
I could not stop the process - only option was to reboot.

When I rebooted, scandisk took over. For the last 2 days I have a scrolling
message on the screen that says "bad links in lost chain at cluster
********* corrected" (last check is was at 4,900,000 and counting).
Sometimes there is a line where the word "truncated???) is at the end of it.
I had read a couple of places on the web that mentioned that 160gb
harddrives had either 4.1mb of clusters (can't be true since I am at 4.9mb)
or 41mb of clusters

Obviously clueless places when they measure clusters in millibits.

(which means the computer has another 37mb more to go - or another 18 days
- YUCHHHHH).

160 GB is (roughly) 40 million clusters at 4kB a cluster or 4 million clusters
at 40kB a cluster. I don't think a 40kB cluster is possible.
So find out your cluster size and you know where scandisk is at the moment.


If I were to stop the process, would the only files lost be the ones that I
was trying to copy from one drive to another?

No.

Would the files that are on the 80gb be OK?

Probably, you tell us. What drive is scandisk running on?

Would the files that were on the 250gb drive originally (100gb) be OK?

Assuming a 4kB cluster size, probably not.

Would the only ones that would be toast be the ones that were to be copied?

Probably not. Sounds like you may have the 137GB limit trashing your drive.

Would they be converted to chk files?

HELP HELP HELP!!!!!

spk

I've just encountered this very problem, so will recount what happened
in case it's of any use to others. It's too late for me
unfortunately:

My PC has a 13GB Win2k C: Drive and a 160GB Seagate D: Drive for
storing my music collection. No previous signs of problems with the
160GB drive, but on a boot up W2k invoked scandisk (I think) which
then started checking the drive automatically (it gives 10 seconds to
cancel) and showed the infamous "bad links in lost chain at cluster"
messages. I missed the chance to cancel, and unfortunately decided to
let it finish. My PC is 1.1GHz, and the procedure took 29 hours. It
reported checking 4,882,818 clusters. That means a cluster size of 32k
I believe.

When the procedure had finished I checked my D: Drive in windows and
saw ALL my music files had been changed to 32k files. Curiously a
'lost files' (or similarly named) folder had been created, containing
exactly 10,000 32k files which totalled about 350MB. These were lost
cluster segments. Possibly I hit some sort of limit here, causing the
problem?

There was no sign of the remaining 40GB of files that should have been
there - I assume windows decided to destroy the segments. Thanks MS!

Luckily I had the sense to back up a lot, but not all, of these files.
I'll be trying some other recovery steps, but I think the data is gone
for good.
The following is a useful page detailing the problems with scandisk:
http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/scandisk.htm

Backup, backup, backup, I can't stress it enough. Time to start
following my own advice

I forgot to add that when the scandisk process finally finished, I was
asked if I wanted to repair the files. As with the cancel option, this
quickly defaults to a yes and the repair process starts (I was lucky
to be at the PC at the time to see this at all). Another message then
said I did not have enough space on the disc for the repair and
windows booted up. I had filled less than half the drive, so I was
unlucky here, maybe temp repair files meant there wasn't enough space
left to create repaired copies of the files?

If the utility had given me the option, I could have chosen another
drive to send the repaired files to, but there was no such option.
Even a warning when it starts to say 'this could damage your files -
please use a file recovery program first' would be useful - why don't
they do things like this???

I felt I should add this info, as someone else may be luckier and have
the necessary space available. Possibly scandisk would have repaired
my files correctly had my disk been emptier- i'll never know.

In my case, windows now showed a directory tree - all files and
folders were present and correctly named, but the files were all 32k
in size (I assume this is what the 'truncated' part of the scandisc
messages mean?). Did scandisk chop off a 32k segment from each file,
or create new 32k versions of each file? I'm still looking into this,
as there may still be untouched files on the drive that I can recover
(possibly with a raw file recovery program that looks for file
signatures).

My advice at this point to anyone seeing this utility start up would
be to stop it immediately, recover and back-up everything you need
there and then using a file recovery program, and THEN risk letting
scandisk fix things.

**Please note I am referring to the utility that starts on rebooting a
Windows2000 machine and is a black screen, I assume it is 'scandisk'
or 'chkdisc' etc but not sure. I'm not referring to the good old
bluescreen 'scandisk' we all know from Win95/98 - that one never
caused this much damage!

- - edited a couple times to add info.

Hi floval, this message probably won't help you much considering the
date of your post, but perhaps it can be useful to others since i could
hardly find anything useful about it on the internet.

3 Days ago i went through the same thing. This is on my 160GB Western
Digital, using Win XP. I bought this drive less than 6 months ago and
there was no indication of the drive failing before it happened.
After the 24 - 30 hours in scandisk the drive also seems to be working
fine, except for about 80% of my files only being either 32kb in size
or 64kb and another 10% being renamed to a bunch of ascii characters,
some with a very large filesize.

For the past day i've been searching for data recovery tools, basically
having little to no luck with them until now.
I've found this program called "Recover my Files v3.2" that seems to be
doing the trick. Already i have managed to recover my most important
files that the disk had indicated to be only 32kb in size.

Also, during my use of various data recovery tools i have discovered
something that may be connected to the problem. Some of these tools
indicated that the physical size of my disk is only 128GB, however the
logical size is something around 149GB. Now i'm not expert at this and
i don't have a clue what it means, but the problem started after i
passed the 128GB. Also i have read another post from someone where the
problem had occured twice. Both times, he claimed, it happened when the
160GB disk was at about 80% of its capacity, which once again equals
the 128GB barrier.

Perhaps the problem is not the disk itself. IIRC on "older" mainbords
the maximum capacity for a drive is 128GB. Why the drive does show up
as 160Gb then is unclear to me. But perhaps some of the techies around
here can provide an explanation.

Regards from The Netherlands,

Max

floval wrote:
I've just encountered this very problem, so will recount what
happened
in case it's of any use to others. It's too late for me
unfortunately:

My PC has a 13GB Win2k C: Drive and a 160GB Seagate D: Drive for
storing my music collection. No previous signs of problems with the
160GB drive, but on a boot up W2k invoked scandisk (I think) which
then started checking the drive automatically (it gives 10 seconds to
cancel) and showed the infamous "bad links in lost chain at cluster"
messages. I missed the chance to cancel, and unfortunately decided to
let it finish. My PC is 1.1GHz, and the procedure took 29 hours. It
reported checking 4,882,818 clusters. That means a cluster size of
32k
I believe.

When the procedure had finished I checked my D: Drive in windows and
saw ALL my music files had been changed to 32k files. Curiously a
'lost files' (or similarly named) folder had been created, containing
exactly 10,000 32k files which totalled about 350MB. These were lost
cluster segments. Possibly I hit some sort of limit here, causing the
problem?

There was no sign of the remaining 40GB of files that should have
been
there - I assume windows decided to destroy the segments. Thanks MS!

Luckily I had the sense to back up a lot, but not all, of these
files.
I'll be trying some other recovery steps, but I think the data is
gone
for good.
The following is a useful page detailing the problems with scandisk:
http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/scandisk.htm

Backup, backup, backup, I can't stress it enough. Time to start
following my own advice