Dusted the computer, re-applied thermal paste, Now harddrives acting strange. Changed names and deleted files.

[Woffbjeff]

So we cleaned our computers today and my wife's computer is acting strange.
She might have swapped the sata cables but nothing else. So basically one of the hdd's stole one of the other drives names and deleted a lot of files.. we tried sfc and chkdsk in CMD but that didn't turn up much. Tried restarting, safe mode and swapping the sata cables again.

 

[SuperSoph_WD]

Welcome to Tom's Hardware, @Woffbjeff!

This sounds pretty unfortunate for your wife's files! I'd advise you to go to Disk Management in Windows and check how both drives are listed there. Please, share a screenshot if you can, it would be truly helpful. I'd advise you not to run CHKDSK for now, it won't retrieve any of the files really. If they are so important to her and you, you should probably try some third-party data recovery tool at your own risk (maybe a Ubuntu Live CD ). But keep in mind that a professional data recovery company would be your best bet on getting any of that data back! You should also try plugging the HDD in your PC as well and see how it will get recognized there (as a secondary drive).

Keep me posted with the troubleshooting!
SuperSoph_WD

 

[Woffbjeff]

Heya. We actually ran Recuva and recovered what was important. We also did a fresh install of w10 and uninstalled all partitions (she had so many it was hilarious) Now we are just trying to figure out how it happened and what we can do to make sure it doesn't happen again.