Steam decided to delete ENTIRE partition

Steam was giving me trouble logging in, so I decided to reinstall to fix it. Little did I know that by uninstalling steam it was going to complete wipe the entire partition it was in. I went though the uninstall procedure and it didn't prompt me saying it was going to remove anything except the steam client. I check my games partition (160gb) and it's completely empty. Every last folder deleted. Why would steam do this? More importantly, how could it do this?

I'm completely baffled, annoyed and frustrated by this. Does this mean I have to go to the bother of redownloading and installing all these games? Looking out all my CD's to install everything that was deleted?

Would a system restore work, maybe?

The irony is, steam still doesn't work! It doesn't even want to update now.

Sorrow I feel now
For Haiku's lost Steam games
No help I can give

I see what you did there.

Are you sure it was caused by steam, and was not the result of an underlying HDD problem

Well, I did a system restore and that didn't really fix the problem. All the folders came back, but instead each folder is around 30-50mb, just containing various shortcuts and registry files - no game data.

Is this possibly a hard drive problem that was somehow effected by uninstalling steam? Steam still works fine, so everything except the steam client has been pretty much wiped.

Never seen this happen before (and I have uninstalled steam a lot of times)....neither can i find anything quickly via goggle....

So, I'd like to give valve the benefit of the doubt......have you run chkdsk on the drive yet?

Running chkdsk now :) .

Never heard of anything like this happen, and i have uninstalled and reinstalled tons of crap on steam (and steam itself).

Let us know what the results of your check disk are.

File recovery software? A simple run of FreeUndelete 2 ought to bring some back (unless you've been writing to the drive a lot since).

Not really that bothered now, after realising I only play about 5 games. It is still saying there is about 10gb used up in that partition, even though there are no folders. Can I format that one partition? Or do you have to format the entire drive?

Yeah you can format just the one partition.

And when you have reformatted, and reloaded, and got everything back - don't forget to back it up.. :)

Guess is not too bad if you werent too bothered.

Could have been much worse though!