I have experienced the weirdest problem ever. Let me explain what i was doing right before the problem occured and then i'll get the the problem itself. I might include some apparently irrelevant info, but i'm doing so just in case they happened to be pertinent.
I am using Windows XP professional, SP2. My system is Intel pentium 4, CPU=2.4 GHz, 2GB of RAM.
my bittorent (version 6.1.2) and utorrent (version 1.8.2) programs are both running. a bunch of torrents being downloaded, bunch being uploaded. everything normal. The "unfinished" and "completed" folders for unfinished and completed torrents respectively are on an external hard drive (J).
I am trying to use Nero burner to burn a data DVD. I wanted to burn some files that were located in an .iso file on that external hard drive(J). So i didn't want to burn the whole .iso image file, but only some files that i knew were in that image file.
I could burn that whole image on a CD and then access them with nero and burn only the ones that i needed (I wanted to burn only some for a friend who didnt' need everything on that image file)
But i didn't want to waste a CD to burn that image, since i wasn't going to use that CD and i could simply open the .iso file with Alcohol.
So what i did was that with Alcohol 120%, I mounted the image file on a virtual drive(K). Now my nero could see that virtual drive, open it, just like any other drive and burn the specific files from that image file(which is really on J). Since i wasn't sure this method would work and nero could really access those files in the image file on the virtual drive, and since i didnt' want to waste a blank DVD, I thought I better burn this compilation (as nero calls it) as an image file itself and later, once sure that nero accessed those files without problem, burn the image file on my DVD. So it did this and the image was burnt with no problem.
Now i put the blank DVD in the drive to burn the newly produced image. Nero goes up to 77% and halts for over an hour. The system has frozen and nothing works, even Ctrl+Alt+Del wouldn't bring up the task manager.
So i'm forced to force a reset. I do so, and once the system reboot something weird has happened:
ALL the torrents in both utorrent and bittorrent are totally disappeared from both programs. The "unfinished" and "completed" folders are still on that external drive J and all the files, both the completed files and the unfinished ones (.!bt) are intact.
The torrents are cleared in both programs however.
One thing i can do is to redownload the torrent files (.torrent) again, (if I could find the exact ones at all) and drag them into the programs and hopefully they'll recognize them as partially-done torrents and therefore would resume download.
However I'm really really curious and interested to understand what happened there!! and besides if there is any method of saving my stuff to a point before such crash?