I work with Windows XP everyday and use it to save ALL my photos from my digital camera.

Then, one day, I got the dreaded blue screen of death. I was very glad that there was Windows XP automatic Scandisk and Checkdisk, a vicious cycle of start… restart…start… restart… Little did I know that my hard disk was broken with physical bad sectors.

Be careful when using Scandisk and Checkdisk because everything is gone! The disk checking program is not capable of diagnosing the correct problem (ie a faulty hard drive disk) and misdiagnoses it as a file system problem and then attempts to (often automatically!) repair the problem.

Data that was often fully recoverable now becomes damaged, fragmented, and unrecoverable.