File magically disappeared, still visible in the Windows search index

I was looking for a file when I noticed it was gone. I fired up the Windows search engine and Search Everything, both of which said the file was still there. When I try to open the search result in any media player, it says the file could not be found.

I already restarted my system, but both search engines still say the file exists. Is the file still there? I cannot find it with Undelete Plus, but it did find a lot of files that were recently deleted.

On the partition I installed Windows on. Maybe it's worth noting that I also use openSUSE, which has read/write access to the partition. That said, I've never had any problems with it messing up Windows partitions so I don't think it is related to me accessing the partition on Linux.

I can't see the file in openSUSE. I see all other files in the directory, but not the file I'm looking for. I'm not sure if I was clear, but the file was on my Windows partition which is also accessible from Linux. I can read my Linux partitions from Windows using a special plugin, but I can't write to them.

But even assuming that it was accidentally deleted, why is the file still showing up in Windows Search and Search Everything?

seth500 said:

Can you manually navigate to the location instead of using the search function and if so is the file there?

It is not there. After rebuilding the search index, Windows Search is no longer displaying the search result either. Search Everything is still showing the file.



I've looked at the Properties window of the associated folder to see if I can restore a previous version of the file, but none of the previous folder backups contain the file.



Are there any other tricks I can try to recover the file? As I mentioned, I've already tried Undelete Plus but it didn't find the file.

Sorry about the Dutch - I was hoping you'd recognize the dialog from the English version of Windows 7. I ran the data recovery tool, but like Undelete Plus it didn't detect a deleted file with that name. Fortunately the file wasn't of major importance to me, but I would have liked to know what happened to it. Ah well, stuff happens. :)