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Hey Guys,

My dad was showing a friend some Photos earlier today, and his computer froze on him. He left it for a while, but it remained frozen so he did a forced shut-down.

When he restarted the computer, he noticed that a bunch of Icons and Folders from his desktop were missing. He has restarted, made sure that hidden files and folders are shown, refreshed the desktop & made sure that desktop icons are shown.

He even went through the Folder Path to the Desktop folder and couldn't see the missing icons or folders.

However, something weird is he remembers the name of a couple of Folders, and would run a search for them, and the search would find them under the Desktop folder. He can simply copy paste them to another location and they remain showing in the new location.

OF course he doesn't remember the name of all the missing files and icons, but this leads him to believe that they are not deleted, they are just somehow not showing.

He is running Windows XP, and is running a Virus/Adware/Malware scan right now, but so far it's coming up clean.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Maybe the icons have been displaced off screen? Strange, but I guess computer errors cause some weird shit to happen :/

That's the only thing I can think of right now. You could try to set the computer on a bigger resolution... maybe they'll show up?

EDIT:
if the files show up through a search, can't you just right-click one and press open file location? Shouldn't all his files be visible then?

Files could have been corrupted and windows tossed them, but I don't think Windows does that.. Run a disk check on the drive to see if there are any errors. Probably sectors of the drive went bad from that forced shutdown. That's my best guess.

Toshiharu wrote:Files could have been corrupted and windows tossed them, but I don't think Windows does that.. Run a disk check on the drive to see if there are any errors. Probably sectors of the drive went bad from that forced shutdown. That's my best guess.

sectors won't go bad after 1 forceful shutdown.
Corruption of file tables or index is more plausable.

windows+r
cmd
enter
chkdsk c: /r (if C is ur drive with the documents)
enter
press Y to do the chkdsk after a reboot
cmd window will close
reboot pc
let it run
see if it's fixed

No help but something similar happened to me a year ago. I was just browsing my images and my whole picture folder got deleted (including all my .PSDs)

Skyve wrote:No help but something similar happened to me a year ago. I was just browsing my images and my whole picture folder got deleted (including all my .PSDs)

I know that feeling

Do a restore point? Restore your computer to say.. last week?

Avalanche wrote:Do a restore point? Restore your computer to say.. last week?

Corrupted 3/4 of them when I restored.

Panu wrote:

Skyve wrote:No help but something similar happened to me a year ago. I was just browsing my images and my whole picture folder got deleted (including all my .PSDs)

I know that feeling

If u really lost data
try easeus data recovery
http://www.easeus.com/download.htm

we use the paid full version at work, it's really good

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the Tips. Another breakthrough happened.

My dad was reading around online, and read a tip about using the CMD prompt.

What we found out is that through the CMD window, all the files, folders, short-cuts everything that was missing from the Desktop could be seen, and using the Copy Command we were able to copy all of the files and folders to another location, which in turn made them visible...

Still have no idea how this happened, or why the computer refuses to display these files or folders even though they are apparently still there.

We feel we have copied most of them, but there might be one or 2 that we couldn't find. Still, strange phenomenon.

Key-J wrote:We feel we have copied most of them, but there might be one or 2 that we couldn't find. Still, strange phenomenon.

"Zombies" might have been the easiest way.. to explain the phenomenon xD