Entire Program Files (x86) Folder... Lost? Orphaned?

Leap_ · March 3

I've been having odd, occasional issues with my W11 Home NVME boot drive, so I bought another one of the same size/type to clone it onto in hopes that would resolve it.

While using Macrium Reflect with the new and old boot drives plugged into a second PC, when cloning it gave me an "Error 0" and told me to run a specific chkdsk command with some extra parameters in it (apologies for not having the exact command, I didn't write it down and I can't exactly go back and replicate it). This ran about half an hour of checking and repairing the drive.

Before continuing with the clone, I tried plugging my original drive back into my PC to see what had become of it after the error correction, and... well at first it just gave me a black screen. Then rebooting, it got stuck on the windows welcome screen before eventually turning into a black screen. On third boot, it ran some error corrections on the boot drive, and now I'm back into windows, but... my Program Files (x86) folder was just... gone. I can view hidden folders, but there was nothing there, and any programs that were installed there fail to boot. There's just an empty, generic file named Program Files (x86) now on my C: drive. Windows still shows the drive taking up about ~750GB of space, but windirstat shows only ~400 GB of actual files.

I tried running /sfc scannow again, and this found and repaired some errors. It restored the Program Files (x86) folder, but now only with ~80 MB of boilerplate Windows folders now present. There's still ~350 GB or so of space that Windows thinks is taken up but I can't access.

I managed to complete the clone (with Clonezilla instead, long story), and the new drive seems to not be having the same issues that put me on this path (hooray), but the Program Files (x86) folder still has the same issue.

Does anyone have any suggestions for how to restore access to this data, or failing that, at least make it usable by windows again without nuking my installation? I know "just reinstall windows" is the obvious answer but there's a lot of misc. stuff I've got installed and set up in specific ways that would be really time consuming to get all back to working again, so if there are any options I'd like to at least try.

OddOod · March 3

Welcome to the forums!

2 hours ago, Leap_ said:

having odd, occasional issues with my W11 Home NVME boot drive

What kind of issues?

2 hours ago, Leap_ said:

clone it onto in hopes that would resolve it.

Cloning can cause problems. Some people here swear by it, but I've only had a 30% success rate
I have long believed that being able to rebuild your comfortable computing environment is a valuable skill.

2 hours ago, Leap_ said:

suggestions for how to restore access to this data

It really depends on what exactly the initial problem was.

Leap_ · March 3

18 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Welcome to the forums!

What kind of issues?

Cloning can cause problems. Some people here swear by it, but I've only had a 30% success rate
I have long believed that being able to rebuild your comfortable computing environment is a valuable skill.

It really depends on what exactly the initial problem was.

Thank you!

The main issues I noticed were:

1. Whenever I restarted my PC, it would tell me 'Scanning and repairing drive (C:)...', and then just immediately skip to windows.

2. My Nvidia App would just always crash on startup. No matter how many times I reinstalled or wiped its settings.

3. When I ran Error Checking under properties for the drive, it would find errors, tell me to restart to repair them, and then it would do that 'Scanning and repairing drive (C:)...' thing twice, fail/skip both and return to windows.

4. Games installed on the drive (and only this drive) would occasionally hard crash my PC, generally with me losing video while audio continued to play in the background until I restarted. (trying the keyboard shortcut to restart my video driver, CTRL + ALT + DEL, etc. did not work)

SMART read as healthy, and running the usual command line commands to try and scan and repair it didn't turn up anything, but I figured something was up and it was time to replace it.

I haven't had a chance to fully test it yet, but so far it seems like these issues are actually fixed after the clone. I'm suddenly able to open my Nvidia app, and windows no longer is no longer constantly trying to repair the drive every startup. Honestly the clone itself seems to have gone well enough, the problem is that in the process of doing so, running that chkdsk repair command recommended by Macrium beforehand wiped out my Program Files (x86) folder on the source drive, which naturally carried over to the cloned drive. (though I figured it was worth a shot to see if cloning fixed it, since I was already trying to clone it)

So the clone was successful, basically; I don't think it's the source of the issue, just worth mentioning since it's relevant to what I was trying to do here. I really just need to figure out how to either restore, or at least wipe out and make available the space taken up by the Program Files (x86) folder, since right now that data is basically gone but windows still thinks that space is taken up and unavailable, even though I can't access it at all through file explorer.

Leap_ · March 8

Just want to note here in case anybody somehow has a similar issue, I eventually gave up and just reset windows, choosing to keep my files. However, when I did so, a found.002 file appeared on my C drive that was still invisible/inaccessible from windows explorer, but now visible and accessible with windirstat. Using windirstat, I was able to move out the folders I wanted to keep and then clear out the rest of the files. So I did have to reset things still, but I was at least able to recover the data that got orphaned.