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clean up disaster

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pawz

Technical User
Dec 24, 2002
258
GB
Hello all.

I have had an unpleasant experience!!

My OS is XP Prof SP1 in NTFS.

I decided it was time for a re-organisation and tidy up on my cluttered HDD, so I went to 'Disk Cleanup' on the property sheet of each drive

(CDEF), and clicked on the button. I had 'compress old files' and 'indexing' enabled. When it had finished compressing old files it gave me the

window with the tickable boxes on the left. I noticedthe bottom one had quite a few Kb's against it, and the description, when I highlighted it for

action, said 'these files are left over from a previous indexing operation and are safe to delete' - so I did.

Bad move.

I lost probably two thirds of the files in each drive, deleted. It seems to have deleted all files not in folders and in those folders it didn't take,

selecting some files/folders, but not others, and not necessarily old files, as one doc I had only just finished work on and hadn't yet backed up.

I lost applications, games, utilites, web pages, docs, dll's, drivers - everything.

Horrified I was.

When I had recovered from the shock,and retrieved as much of my stuff as I could, I backed up and then repeated the procedure in just one

drive. It did it again. It took folders and it took some folders and files within folders.

I have now turned off indexing, yet it still goes through the procedure of cataloguing indexed files if I invoke disk cleanup, so it isn't turned off

at all it seems.

I can't believe this is supposed to happen. Surely there is something wrong with my system!

My antivirus, adware and spyware is all up to date.

Has anyone else had this experience or perhaps can explain the situation please??
 
I did try, but it didn't help. I have recovered the doc I didn't back up, which was really important. The rest is backed up or replaceable - and I DID want to clean the disk up anyway, so now that I have got back the stuff I had just finished working on, I am not too upset - but what does concern me is that it happenened at all.

Was the machine supposed to do that I wonder?

I wanted a disk cleanup of rubbish, and I thought I was just deleting some temporary cache of indexed files - not the real things.

I would like to know if this IS a normal part of XP or if it is some odd behaviour special to my machine...
 
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