Weird happenings... Empty HD?!?!?

LokiStormrunner

Well, my external hard drive was getting full yesterday from downloading music, to be expected. But, i turn it on this morning and it says that it's empty! Now, i was talkin to my friend, and i think we've figured it out, but i want your opinions too. And, if it's what we think it is, i still need help fixing that part of it.

Good ol' windows to the rescue.... (yeah right!!)... Windows decided to tell me that my hard drive was getting full and it wanted to do a disk clean up... I should have known not to do that, but i was doing other things at the time so i thought nothing of it... It told me that it would be safe to delete the old indexing files off the drive... It wouldn't give me much, but i figured since i had just scanned the drive, i might as well do it...
Now we think that's the problem, we think windows can't detect the files cause they're not indexed at all. Cause it's not like the whole drive is deleted, the folders are still in the same places, right where they're supposed to be. But all the files within them are just not there anymore...

Can someone please help!!!

CB

All I can tell you is that it's not the indexing. That's not what indexing does. You're thinking of your File Allocation Table, which tells the computer where all of your files are. 'Indexing' is a windows feature that makes search functions easier, and has nothing to do with locating the files normaly.

LokiStormrunner

is there any way i could have deleted or altered the File Allocation Table? Or can anyone else think about what could be wrong?

Thrax

http://icrontic.com/articles/advanced_data_recovery

This guide is for you. Nothing else can help you.