So I got a virus through God knows what, and it couldn't be detected through McAfee, I could not restore to an existing time becuase I didn't make a restore point( now I do). I restarted windows XP, hit F10 for the system restore. I have done this before and nothing was lost. This time I lost all of my photos, and all of my music, no porgrams, just the pics and mp3's. My question is can I get them back, I havent reformatted my hardrive since the restore. I tried a freeware file recovery thing but it didn't reall work, any solutions to get my stuff back? My pics are so important to me please help!!!

You should have mentioned which recovery program failed, and how it failed. Restoring your system would probably overlay some of the files. When you have a need to recovery files, the best thing to do is not use that drive at all. Physically remove the drive, attach it as a slave to another system and then do the recovery. Here are a couple that normally work. PC Inspector (freeware) http://www.snapfiles.com/get/pcinsp... http://www.z-a-recovery.com The demo is limited It will only recover 'up to' four folders per run But you can make multiple runs

These other programs are also very good at recovering lost files: - Recuva (pronounced "recover"), a free but great program available from recuva.com - GetDataBack, which isn't free but usually gives good results. This one can be downloaded from www.runtime.org and you must choose whether you want the version that works on FAT32 disks or partitions, or the one that works on NTFS systems. Good luck, Juan

Might look at runtime.org stuff. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Aequis-- I used freeware,"Undelete Plus" and it found enormous amounts of files. I filtered it down to mp3's and jpegs, but the images would not show, and the mp3'w would not work even though they showed the file and same old path. I downloaded file recoverer also, it found a ton of stuff, but it wants $30 for the program for me to repair and replace the files I don't want to spend $30 and it not work, and unfortunatley I do not have another system to hook my HD up to. thankyou for the advice though, I appreciate it!