Navvy

I'm trying to recover documents that were lost when someone reinstalled Windows XP Home without taking any backup. Recuva deep scan showed about 73,000 files found, but then it stopped with "Unknown system error 0x00000008" and did not display any files. There is now only one partition on this physical drive, which is the boot partition for Windows. C: is about 27GB and there is about 7GB unallocated. Recuva is running in the C: partition. Would that cause an "unknown system error"? If so, why isn't there any warning about possible problems in such an obvious scenario? This is not a BSOD, just a small message in the status line at the bottom of the window. A bit of googling suggested that this error might be due to damaged file structure, but Recuva should be expecting that, shouldn't it? This is the first time I've tried using Recuva. I've now tried PC Inspector on the same drive, and after scanning all the sectors that has reported "error no.27 drv:128 LBA:64880510 blocks:2" "Abort, Retry, Ignore". Ignoring a couple of times allowed me to view everything that had been found, although it doesn't seem to include any of the lost documents (which were MS Works files). Does anyone have any thoughts on why Recuva fails to handle something that appears to be a file system error?

I've had problems on two different laptops after using Defraggler 2.08 and setting it to shutdown when the defrag operation is completed. I left it running overnight, so I wasn't there when it shut down. In one case it just looked like a minor problem in the registry, with a folder in Program Files opening at startup. In the other case, it was a complete show-stopper. Registry files reported as missing or corrupt, and Windows unable to start. After patching that, I got a corrupted hal.dll message. These look typical symptoms of a premature shutdown. Fan ducting was cleaned a few months ago, and I have no reason to suspect a thermal shutdown, and it's a laptop with a good battery, so it couldn't be a power cut. Anyone else had any similar problems?