Data Recovery for Winnt

[sung78]

Last week, I restarted my windows nt for the first time in a month. However, before I entered Windows NT, the screen went blue with a lot of messages saying something like "Deleting Orphan File records XXXXX" where XXXXX are a bunch of numbers. This went on for about 20 minutes and by the time I went into Win NT, I found all files from my 160 GB hard drive were gone. I didn't touch that hard drive since. Does anyone know why this is happening and if there is anyway to recover my lost data without using any file recovery program? If file recovery application is necessary, is there any suggestion?
Any help/hint would be greatly appreciated.

 

[SYAR2003]

If file recovery application is necessary, is there any suggestion?
Any help/hint would be greatly appreciated.


This is how i do.

Take that drive out , dont do any formatting partitioning installing to it.

Put in a "new" drive with equal or larger size
buy one / borrow one .
Or a little drive + an external usb drive .
Install windows on a (say 10GB partition)
Make the rest of the disk a large partition to hold
recovered data or recovery is to the external drive .

Install the program getdataback from (used this the last time , and it's great)

http://www.runtime.org

$79 for recover from ntfs
$69 for recover from fat/fat32
Need to buy licenses to actually do the restore .
(btw this is a good investment)

Connect the "old" drive as slave and recover data
to the "new" drives extra partition or to the external drive.