Yesterday, I performed a non-destructive system recovery after reading the how-to provided by HP (my system is an HP Pavailion 8000). I was assured that none of my data would be destroyed and that only any upgrades I'd done to programs would need to be tweaked...

Well... I'm now sans my 500 or so photos - those I hadn't backed up since January, my recent PST (I had one from January at least); all my documents....

I've done a complete scan of my system - hidden files and all - for those docs and photos but nothing has turned up beyond about 32 photos that, for some reason, didn't disappear.

All the photos in My Pictures are gone but the stuff in My Videos isn't! Weird.

I will be FOREVER indebted to anyone who can help me recover these precious photos and YES, I promise to immediately burn them to a DVD when they're recovered.

Thanks for any help.

WriterWriter
<center>The Stupid Files</center>

Hi there and welcome to PCHF, toy could try this program (from the makers of CCleaner), to try and recover your files. Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File Recovery - Home

Hi there,

Thanks for that. That program found lots of stuff but no photos at all. So strange. I guess they've been overwritten, as I had to reinstall most of my stuff....

Drives me nuts - especially the part where I know better and had a backup file on my desktop. I will know in future that HP doesn't exactly mean "non-destructive" when it says "non-destructive."

WriterWriter
<center>The Stupid Files</center>

A welcome from me too

We share your pain I don't think there's a PC user out there that hasn't lost something in the past.
...hmmmm and they won another customer support award this year. Maybe it's time they thought about Mr or Mrs "Average" when then produce the documentation for their systems.

Wow. I got the most excellent help yesterday from a woman (I think; live help) named Reagan and I now have EVYERTHING I lost!

Here's what I did - and I hope this will be super helpful for anyone else who's had this issue. One thing to note: prior to doing the following, I was searching around in my C: drive and came on my user account. Properties showed that there were 0 bites in the folder. THIS IS NOT ACCURATE. That folder contained all my stuff, as it turned out. If you've used the same user account name as before your 'recovery,' it might be an idea to rename this old account to "Old Account" so you can distinguish between the two when you need to.

Here's how to find your stuff

Restart computer in SAFE mode by hitting F8 unti the Advanced Options menu appears
Hit ENTER when Microsoft XP xxx appears (or your operating system)
Click on the ADMINISTRATOR icon and click ENTER if necessary
Now, click START and my MY COMPUTER
Double click the C: drive
Navigate to the folder containing your old user account. I renamed my user account after my 'recovery' so I was able to easily figure out where to go
RIGHT click that folder and then click PROPERTIES
Click SECURITY
Click ADVANCED
Click OWNER
Place a checkmark in the Replace owner on subcontainers and objects
Wait for the system to do its thing. This step took about 4 minutes
Click APPLY, YES, OK, OK
Restart your computer in normal mode.

After all that, I was able to search for anything *.dsc; *.doc; *.mpg. After that (which gave me all my docs/photos etc),I found out that my entire folder system was still intact and that, rather than copying over all the randomly ordered stuff, I could just bring over everything into my new user account and use it like nothing had happened.

Anyway, happy ending. I still can't exactly find my most recent PST file, but that might be 'cause I hadn't exported it for a while. Bit of a pain because I get new contacts daily through my work. From now on, I'm going to do a monthly PST export. AND I'm going to shift all ALL my important stuff to a HUGE, SECURE hard drive and I'm going to do that every two months from now on too!

Lesson learned.

THANKS to REAGAN at HP Live Help!

WriterWriter
The Stupid Files