Just as the title says, DISC CLEANUP FORMATTED MY HARD DISK!!!!! I ran disc cleanup and it showed me "Windows 98/Me Install Files" so I checked that and Ran disc cleanup. It kept comming up with the Windows Protection Error Message and prompted me to insert the Windows XP Professional CD. I did and it continued. Then it asked for the Service Pack 2 CD. I was about to insert that until I noticed that I had 1.4GB of used hard drive space. I went into my start menu and it was empty. I had no shortcuts. No quicklaunch. Everything was gone. Out of panic, I rebooted with the reset button on the computer. Now all it says is "NTDLR cannot be found, press any key to restart" Its not critical that I recover all my data on this computer since it is my old Pentium 2 but it would be really helpful if I could recover all my data and restore the OS to the way it was before I ran disk cleanup. I cannot run a system restore because that has been deleted.
Actually, it erased most of the disc. I hooked the drive externally to another computer and there was a 500MB windows folder, No documents were there, and the Program Files folder was 5MB. Luckily while looking around on my laptop at the drive, I found a Backup folder with an entire backup of the hard disc that I had created about a year ago (and since this computer was so old, there really wasn't much done to it in the year. I just restored the backup and I am as good as new. I still want to know why disc cleanup actually did that. Thanks for the link though, I'm sure it'll help me in the future.
That's a good question. I would check condition of HDD first - maybe it's a problem with that instead of software issue ? That's the best I can think of besides having a good backup plan. I keep important docs backed up online. It's saved me more than once
The hard drive has been checked for errors and I have not found any. I actually just ran the drive overnight to do a Defrag, Checkdisk, Convert to NTFS, Checkdisc, Finish convert process. And it has been going fine. Today I just did an XP repair because I upgraded the processor in the system to a P3 with a BIOS downgrade so I know that the drive is in good condition. The drive is a 16GB Maxtor (Those old LOUD ones.
