Files Became Inaccessible

[TubeSock]

I've spent the last couple of days trying to figure out how to recover the files contained within an important folder to me. It's getting really frustrating because there just doesn't seem to be anything left to try and I was hoping I could find some help.

Yesterday I was reorganizing my hard drive when I decided to drag and drop the folder in question inside another folder located directly on my D:\ drive. It was 17GB so I was surprised when no transfer bar showed up. I went to open it up in its new location but I got an Access Denied error. I checked the properties and it said there was 0kb in the folder, which I thought explained why there had been no transfer bar; just some glitch. I went back to find that the original folder was gone. I checked My Computer. 239GB free space on D:\. This meant the 17GB was still there taking up space, only the new folder was empty and inaccessible, and the old one was gone. I tried searching a few of the files/subfolders up in My Computer. Nothing. That's where I got worried. I asked some friends and tried Yahoo answers and did some Googling to no avail. Desperate, I tried a system restore to a few hours earlier. I rebooted to find the original folder back in its place. When I went inside, all the .mpg's and .jpg's (only file types I had inside) thumbnails had been replaced with the generic filetype thumbnails. I tried to open a .mpg; "Windows Media Player cannot access the file." I tried to open a .jpg; "No preview available." I became frustrated with the seemingly "ghost" files and tried to delete them, move them, and even rename them, only to get a "Access is denied." error every time. I Googled a fix for most Access Denied problems having to do with simple file sharing and file ownership. I set ownership of the folder to myself and found that the thumbnails for a few of the .mpg's had returned. I ran them, they worked fine. Only most of them were still the same as before, and NONE of the image files had worked either.

All of this because of a stupid glitch while trying to move some files. I'd really appreciate some help here because I'm really at my wit's end. Preferably I'd still like to salvage the lost files but if that doesn't work I'd at least like to be able to delete them. Thanks in advance.

[foxy]

Were these all jpg's? Is your D partition where you usually keep your data?

System restore is only for Windows files, not data files.

If you run Recuva, you might recover some of them. Deleted files are not really deleted, but might be overwritten by now. If you recover any, don't save them to the same partition, because you'll be overwriting while you recover.

[fink]

www.recuva.com is the program that Foxy is referring to. It's free.

[foxy]

And it works well, but only if the files aren't overwritten.

Why is s/he getting an "Access Denied," Fink?

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Fink, you've changed! Had a face makeover?

[fink]

Possibly a combination of the need to take ownership and corruption.