Hey Everyone, i installed windows home ed and didnt activate it by the 30 day mark, so then i installed windows 98 se. running 2 OS from 1 HDD, i used 98 for about a month but realised some files were missing that i had created before the change to 98. .instead what was left was empty files! :( I activated XP in hope that they were still there but no, a bunch of files, mostly on the desktop i think of xp have all been deleted, is this what happens when u dont activate or did i hit a virus or something? Or did i overwrite files with 98... Any way is there any way i can get these files back, all the files on start menu are gone Feedback plz i dont wanna lose the music i had 3 tracks completely done for my demo cd

Dave, SWAG, not necessarily the deal, but maybe? 98's FAT32 while XP MIGHT be NTFC. They don't play well together. If that's the case, one may not be able to see the other. What to do about it? Dunno. Maybe someone does. HTH. Ed in Texas.

You may want to look into this http://www.mediarecover.com/downloads.html I had a friend who wiped her Hard drive and did a fresh install, and used this product to recover all of her files. Dell never told her that when she did a fresh install after her HD crash she would lose all of her files on her hard drive, hmmmm....sounds familiar! She had to take out her HD and have someone with another PC slave her drive to retreive what she needed. The thing is, and files that were on the desktop will come out as orphan files, which means they will be named a number and a size. You may be able to identify your tracks by their size. The files in my documents will be named correctly. Good Luck friendly and helpful for better computing in all areas *smile*