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In an attempt to solve an inherent Windows problem, I tried to compress my main partition (using windows own compressing option), like in the figure below, and then, when I reboot it says "Bootmgr is compressed".

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I had to use the OS DVD to repair my boot file and then, when I finally start Windows, I receive the great surprise that I lost all my data... like EVERYTHING. And I am 200% sure that I didn't make a clean OS installation, I just recovered the boot record, nothing more, nothing less.

How come the option ruins your MBR and formats your entire drive?

Now what? Should I even care to attempt recovering files? Since they are "compressed" probably it is a goodbye forever, no recovery tool shall ever be able to recover them. What can I use?

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    Its unlikely the act of compressing your system drive resulted in the data loss, its likely the problems you faced before you did so, were the reason you had data loss. Without knowing what problem you were trying to solve it cannot be fully explained.
    – Ramhound
    May 21, 2015 at 12:38
  • It is not the first time, happened 3 times in a row, in three computers, this time was just to make sure. It happens, it is very frequent look: google.pt/…
    – PedroD
    May 21, 2015 at 12:42
  • And this: google.pt/…
    – PedroD
    May 21, 2015 at 12:42
  • Yep that is exactly it. You are just throwing in the towel without even trying to perform data recovery, you should, might be shocked at the sucess you will have. I will just ignore your last comment(s).
    – Ramhound
    May 21, 2015 at 12:45
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    @PedroD - Why didn't you just disable the startup applications and find the application that was causing startup times to be unacceptable?
    – Ramhound
    May 21, 2015 at 13:30

1 Answer 1

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I've never used this option on an entire disk but I remember from a Windows course that enabling NTFS compression on the system drive (usually C:) is not recommended.

If you want to use compression it's better to enable this on a per-folder basis, for example activating the compressing only your "large RAW pictures" folder by rightclicking -> Properties -> Advanced -> check the "Compress contents to save space". This incurs a performance overhead and usually only reduces space by 0% to 30% so it's usually a last resort option.

I suspect the missings files are due to the Windows repair, you should be able to uncompress the disk and run a file recovery software like Recuva

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  • I did a check disk, it recovered the boot record. The following files, I could never recover them. I will try recuva, but so far the tools from hirens boot I used could find millions of nameless files, it is impossible to get anything from there.
    – PedroD
    May 21, 2015 at 13:02

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