[mcw]

Well, it finally happened to me... I lost the files on my SD card - previously, all I had to do was eject the card and re-insert, and my files would show up... But not last night.

So, I decided to figure out what had happened... Since data recovery is just one of the things we handle at work, I fired up some applications to figure out where my data went. I assumed that the data was still there, but just no longer visible - similar to when, with Windows 98, if you powered off improperly, your drive would think you had less data than you did, and a scandisk fixed it...

Ran the utils, and all 350MB of files I had thought were gone were sitting right there - the recovery apps said they were right there - I should see them. Until I looked at the PATH... Turns out that something is going wrong with the path structure, the files that were missing were in the "." path... Confused?

Let's say the root of my SD is the "I:" drive... So
I:\Blah.file is where my files were...
But now, they were here:
I:\.\Blah.file

Still there, just in "." - and of course, you can't access that! So I simply had it move the data back to the root, and viola - all my files, no corruption, no lost data.

I decided to do a chkdsk on the card, to see if anything had gone wrong other than the data (it was 5AM and I didn't want to do a full byte scan with the recovery apps). XP's chkdsk reported that the path structure was invalid, and even noted that "." and ".." were wrong, so it corrected them! WARNING - DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU HAVE DATA, XP/VISTA CHKDSK WILL NOT RESTORE YOUR FILES THIS WAY, IT WILL ONLY CORRECT THE BAD PATH, BUT YOUR FILES WILL NOT COME BACK. And, funny thing, it said I had CROSSLINKED FILES! Now that's weird - and the only time that really happens is when write processes are interrupted...

Anyway, for people that have important files that they think they have lost, they can probably be easily recovered... Just do NOT use standard operating system tools to fix it, since they probably won't...