Does anyone here know how to reindex or re-establish the file structure in XP? I have a slave drive that somehow lost it's structure. Fortunately, my PC boots from a different drive so I can see the "bad" drive, but it's out of whack making it nearly impossible to do anything with the content on this drive. If I turn on "Indexing Services" in windows, it'll find all the files and folders when I do a search, but moving or opening these files/folders is an extremely slow process. I'm sure that there is a way to redo the filesystem stucture so the drive doesn't go nuts trying to perform any actions. Please help if you can.

I would say you have one of these problems:
1) Drive is going south
2) Drive cable is bad
3) Bad powersupply

I would recommend using R-Studio to make an image to a different drive and then restore the image.

I concur on the R-Studio suggestion. Don't even bother with any of the built in Microsoft disk checking. Just let the R-Studio recover to another drive.

Format (maybe low-level) and from then on treat that drive with suspicion.

NTFS is a very reliable filesystem, so it's far more likely that something went wrong with the hardware. (If the drive is formatted with FAT32 it could be just about anything.)

But the point is that if you really haven't done anything unusual (like repeatedly trying to hot-swap the drive while the system is running), then the drive is almost certainly dieing, and you've got a small window to save your files.

Anything you do to try and "fix" the drive is likely to just mess things up more. Don't take any chances, and recover all the data you can before trying anything.

Once you've got the drive backed up, "chkdsk" is about all you can do, and you're likely to end up with a whole buch of lost files segments, which are a real pain to sort out. "chkdsk /f /v /r d:" or whatever your drive letter is.

I'll bet that if you look in the event log you'll see a lot of harware level error messages.

--Nathan