Recovering Whole Programs

[Cheesus]

For the past 2 weeks I've been installing games on my hard drive, and every three days or so some of them would vanish from their existing locations. Originally I figured that it was my hard drive dying, but about 30 minutes ago I realized that for some reason Windows Vista enabled 'Write Caching' on both of my hard disks, and I think that this is the cause for my lost data. (As soon as I realized I disabled this option.)

In folder options I enabled 'show hidden files and folders' and in the drive where my games are installed, I found 4 directories named 'found.000', 'found.001', 'found.002', and 'found.003'. Within each of these directories are my missing games. My question is, is there a program or method which will allow me to restore these games to their original folders?

PS I dont care how much you think Vista sux, I like it.

[Hard core Rikki]

I dont think the original path they were in is recooverable. Since you know where they belonged, it should be handy to move them out there manually. They could be corrupted though, so checking them using the game's installer/updater should confirm or infirm that.

PS: Vista is tehh suxx, and Windows is tentacled virus, btw

[Cheesus]

I considered that, but what about all the folders named dir 00**.chk? I have no idea what those are called. Is there a way to rename them back to their original names?

[Hard core Rikki]

Filesystem corruption due to improper restarts and similar operations can do that. I dont think list em back is possible, unless maybe there was an MFT backup somewhere, wich I doubt so. Even rebuilding the MFT now wouldnt list them back in their former folders. Cut/paste seems the only viable thing to do here, apart from deleting all those that require reinstalls.

But perhaps you wished to keep your save files with these games, primarly ?

[Coolsvilleman]

You will probably not be able to figure out which files those used to be without looking inside them. The MFT stores all the directory meta-data which includes names and sizes of files. Therefore like Rikki said without a backup of it chances are it will take alot of work to recover. Just reinstalling the games would be easier. Also Vista is not very good for gaming right now. Many games that should run just fine in vista crash unexpectedly on my comp and run 100% ok in xp so consider a dual boot like myself.