Ok this is weird. Its a old desktop Computer P4 with asus mainboard and 160gb sata hdd.

It has 2 Partition NTFS, one windows and one data. All images, jpg files are on the data hard dics.

What happened is, that one day some images got lost, corrupted....

What happened is that a family picture all of a sudden turned into a car picture of mine but remained with same family..jpg name.

I reinstall windows xp and copied the backup from usb stick to my hard disc....

Next day I install picasa to index all images and the newly copied images show instead of fmaily pictures pictures i had made from australia, which got lost before....

What is happening?

run a scandisk.
Right click on c: , select properties. Select Tools tab. Select Check now.

This will correct any indexing problems the drive has. Since you did not format the drive before reinstalling, the problem could be with the partition.

Yeah that coud be, i just run SMART and it showed some LIfe threatening attributes of the hard disc. HD TUne also found damaged sectors..... I guess its time to get a new hdd, this wa my momn had for 5 years or so, maybe longer a samsung one.

50 euros for a new one should do... its just for office and stuff.. thanks mate

Riccardo, of course make sure you're backups are solid. Then go to a command prompt (Start-->Run) and type: chkdsk x: /f) ...where x: is the drive letter of the afflicted disk. If Windows can fix it, it will.

What would that exactly fix? the partition? I doubt i will get back the images that are messed up already as I tried easy recovery....

If the partition table is messed up, I.E index is corrupted, you could get your files back. The system can't see where they are located, or possibly in your case, pointing to the wrong files (which is why you are getting different contends).

Try it. But SINCE SMART IS REPORTING ERRORS, replace the drive too.

Thanks guys... is that the only way to get the index working again? It didnt seem it fixed anything, maybe after I did this I can use recovery again of files? whats the best prog to recover files?

Also, whats the best HDD monitoring program to prevent things like that or say kinda foresee them ?

At a minimum, turn on S.M.A.R.T in your bios. This will alert you at startup if there are any critical errors recorded in the SMART logs.

That is the best way to fix an index. Some recovery programs such as GetDataBack, or some more expensive ones will scan the drive for files themselves without the need for the index. If you really need the data, the program is pretty cheap.

Ok, I do need it.... Which programs should I look for then? I hope there is a option in the bios.. the computer is pretty old 5 years or so, p4 asus board p4c800-e deluxe