fun with encryption programs (aka, dead drive)

[dreamer.redeemer]

here's the quick version: i loaded utimaco's safeguard easy onto my main drive, which caused bsod. so i got in to safe mode, and did system restore. no good. using the recovery console i did fixboot, then fixmbr. at this point it was even worse.
oh yeah, this is key: the drive was never encrypted. i imagine that the prog. rewrote the boot and many other parts of the registry. so then i ran chkdsk /r... at this point i set it up as slave, ran RMF on format restore. it went through all the way and gave me back the file types selected, but it didn't rebuild anything, it didn't find the over 100gb's of music, not any of it. so now i'm wondering what should i run? format or file search? logical drive? it seems to show that much of the drive is corrupted, when i really don't see how that's possible; it never had the time to corrupt the files, the drive was never spinning for more than a few minutes.

[dreamer.redeemer]

i forgot something very peculiar: it shows as having two partitions: about an 8mb fat partition and the rest ntfs. i tried to reinstall windows on the fat part before i ran RMF, but it wouldn't let me; it said it was reserved for the windows installation or something. before i ran RMF for the first time, the drive was unreadable, had no name, etc.... now it has its' old name back, and has files on it. hope that helps some...

[dreamer.redeemer]

i did a full file search on the logical drive for .m4a in addition to the other default file types. ~4700 results after 2 hours, plenty of which are corrupt. i'm hesitant to start any search for mp3's, seeing how the search would take... a long time. any suggestions yet?

[GDH]

I would say that you have scrambled the MFT which is where all your file and folder name information is held.

Your best option is to run a "Complete File Search" which will locate your files, but without their original file and folder names.

Searching for music and multimedia files is resource intensive, so to keep up the search speed, search only for one file type at time. You can stop the search, save files, and then restart the search from where you were up to. To do this, click on the OPTIONS button and under the ADVANCED tab put a tick in the box for "prompt for start cluster...".