Hello,
I ran chkdsk. Unfortunately, it took so long (3+ hours) that I I had to go out before it finished.
When I returned the PC had restarted so I don't what the result was. However, it has not changed anything regarding my lost downloads.
Hello dslomer64.
Thank you for your post.
If I right click the downloads folder it just shows the three downloads I made after everything disappeared.
The results can be seen via these steps:
Check Disk (chkdsk) - Read Event Viewer Log
Hello again,
I tried to see the results of check disk. I followed your tutorial (thank you) but when I right-clicked applications "find" was not highlighted so I couldn't click on it? No idea what to do now.
CHKDSK results:
Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer and open Windows logs in left pane. Double-click "Application". Look for chkdsk in the source column in the right pane for the time chkdsk was run. Double click that row to bring up details.
If the chkdsk is run on a reboot, as it would for a C drive, the results should be under a “wininit” listing in the source column, rather than under chkdsk.
Step 4 in that tutorial is missing some info.
If you follow step 4 exactly as written, you will see this:
If you do these steps:
In the left pane of Event Viewer,
double click on Windows Logs to expand it,
click on Application to select it
then right click on Application
and click on Find.
You should see this:
I have posted this to that tutorial thread too.
Last edited by UsernameIssues; 01 Aug 2015 at 22:35.
I think that Administrative Tools is not shown via control panel unless one changes to one of the icon views.CHKDSK results:
Start/Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Event Viewer and open Windows logs in left pane. Double-click "Application". Look for chkdsk in the source column in the right pane for the time chkdsk was run. Double click that row to bring up details.
If the chkdsk is run on a reboot, as it would for a C drive, the results should be under a “wininit” listing in the source column, rather than under chkdsk.
Start > Control Panel
In the upper right corner, change "View by:" to "Large icons" or "Small icons"
Administrative Tools > Event Viewer.
I had never noticed that the source column can be wininit (locked volume) or chkdsk (unlocked volume). I guess that is because I electronically search for chkdsk - which finds both wininit and chkdsk entries.
Hello UsernameIssues and ignatzatsonic,
Thank you both. I have now been able to see the results of running chkdsk. I don't really understand most of it, but it does seem that nothing 'bad' was found.
FYI My download names all appear in a long list when I click the downloads arrow, but when I try to open them, there is nothing there. Almost all my downloads are word or pdf files associated with my research. No films or music.
I am using a Lenovo ideacentre running intel core i5. Around the time all my downloads disappeared, I "optimised" the system, as prompted to do, since it appeared to be running very slowly. I don't know if that has anything to do with the disappearance? I have "optimised" before with no ill effects - at least, none of which I am aware.
Thank you for helping me.
I did not think that chkdsk would find any problems - but just wanted to check anyway.
The list of downloads that you see in the Firefox browser is just a history that the browser keeps. As you see, that list does not necessarily correlate with files on the hard drive. It appears that some (most?) of the files in the folder named Downloads were removed by some process. The "optimize" process could have been that process. It could have changed what actions it takes based on what it finds or maybe the software doing this optimization was (silently?) updated - so now it does different things.
Each time that you download a file, you might want to use Windows (file) Explorer to move that file to the folder named Documents (My Documents). You would then use Windows (file) Explorer to get to each file that you have downloaded in the past.
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