Hi all,
when I tried to get rid of some spyware on my mum's computer this afternoon, I encountered some serious problems (for my mum that is).
The computer is running on win2000 pro and was suffering from some pop-up ads and some slowdown during surfing the internet. So I decided to run ad-aware first to sort things out. Usually that would do just fine to get rid of the spy/adware, but this time, while scanning, I received a reasonable amount of windows error messages telling me the C drive contained some errors and I should run CHKDSK. These messages appeared at various points during the scan. After the scan was finished I deleted all found items and ad-aware asked me if I wanted to run the program again at next startup because it could not remove some items that were still in use. I clicked yes and planned a CHKDSK run for the next boot as well.
After rebooting the machine, CHKDSK started scanning the C drive, immediately discovering all kinds of errors in clusters and files. Since I thought all errors would be fixed, I went away from the computer and returned after a while. CHKDSK and ad-aware were apparently both finished because Windows was already loaded. But not the way it should!
All shortcuts on the desktop AND all folders with pictures were simply gone! I tried to locate them with the windows find but I could just not find them. So that means around 10 shortcuts are gone (which is obviously no big deal) but 5 or 6 folders with around 600 photo's are gone as well, which IS a big deal for my mum, storing all her important pictures in there.
I checked the storage of the C drive, and the amount of free space was still the same as before of all this happened. But no sign of te photo's.
Could someone tell me what could have happened or what I could try to retreive the pictures? Maybe someone knows if CHKDSK creates a log file and where, maybe that log file could tell what happened?
Thanks in advance!!!

Just a couple of points:

1. If CHKDSK is returning errors consistently, think about buying a new hard drive.

2. Even though Windows will best attempt to fix data in CHKDSK, if it cannot read an area it cannot copy the bad areas data to a good area, and as it may be a system file... well anything can happen then.

3. Try fixing the Windows system from the install CD. Or use the SFC System File Checker:

Look here for SFC:
http://windows.about.com/library/weekly/aa000723a.htm