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A friend just upgraded 98 to XP and now all of his files under the My Documents folder (from 98) are now gone! Also his Outlook Express settings are gone too.
Did XP backup his files somewhere? Or, did XP just kindly delete them to make room for XP's My Documents folder?
Dire need of help here... a HUGE thanks to anyone who can help retrieve this poor man's files.
P.S. Of course no backups were made to resort to.
"Of course no backups were made to resort to."
Definately not a good thing. You could try data recovery software.. maybe its still floating around somewhere.
Did anything survive the upgrade? Software? Anything? If not.. Maybe he chose a clean install and deleted the data himself.
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Hi Ray.
Does this help?
Q: I did an Upgrade installation to XP and now my files are missing. Where did they go?A: If Windows XP was installed using default settings, look in C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\My Documents where %username% is the name you entered at login.
Take care,Linda
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Thanks for the quick response. He told me that there are program folders kicking around. ie. Digital camera software. But, it just seems to have wiped all the files from the My Documents Folder only. Seems most everything survived, but the most important info. Murphy's Law I suppose.
Any recommendations on "free" data recovery software?
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Does Lindas advice help? [didnt think about that :)].
Has he tried searching for "myfavoritemovie.mpeg" to see if his data exists somewhere else?
No idea about free stuff but google search for "data recovery software" turns up a million hits.
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Hi again.
When I upgraded from Windows 9x/Me to Windows XP, the C:\My Documents folder was emptied! What happened to all my documents!?Because Windows XP is a true multi-user system, each user has his or her own documents folder, located in a very specific directory structure. Go to C:\Documents and Settings. You should see a folder under there for each user. Under each user will be a folder called My Documents.
This explanation is a bit clearer than the one I found above.
Take care,Linda
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He's of course not home, so I cannot try anything until tomorrow morning at the earliest. I just talked to a guy who tried helping him out, and he told me that XP made a temp folder (one with a $) but was empty.
He then told me that the installation halted/froze at 49% or something like that and he rebooted. Now, I'm not sure what he did next though. Whether or not he tried to "repair" the installation or he did a clean installation overtop of the failed installation.
Thanks for the suggested help. I'll post late tomorrow with the results.
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Not to be mean but why the hell did he not back up his important data? Even if the data is still on the hard drive he should have a back up. I bet even after this the important data will not be backed up. Here is a news flash....ALL hard drives will fail and if you don't have your data backed up you WILL loose it.
KTTD
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Make sure that show hidden files is enabled when you are looking for the files. Goto the the view tab of the folder options to enable this. If you did an upgrade and not a clean install they should be on the drive somewhere.
KTTD brings up a very good point, All hard drives will fail. Imagine if that happened and you had a 250 gig hard drive full of important files. When that happens there's only one person to blame. With fast cd burners for $50 (and dvd burners for $300) there really isn't any excuse not to back up.
My hard drive is almost 6 years old. The average life of a hard drive is 4-6 years. But I'm not worried in the least, cause I back up everything that I plan on keeping :) Plus I need a new drive any ways LOL.
Sandman
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Oops I meant to say
"Goto the the view tab of the folder options control panel to enable this."
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USE ontrack file restore programme. There is a free trial,so you can try it and if you know how to use the web you can get it for free. I used this to recover nearly 200 digital pics that i had deleted and formatted my hard drive.
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Silly suggestion - has your friend got a partitioned HD? When I up graded from ME to XP, XP created its own 'My Documents'on my 'C' drive, none of my files were there!!!! Frustration or what?
BUT - MY 'My Documents' was on my second partition, and still there, along with all my files.
Could this be what has happened?
Happy Xmas from over the Big Pond
John
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open search -tools -folder options -view
put dot in show hidden files and folders,and uncheck hide protected operating system files,click apply and close folder options.if he had documents, search for *.txt or *.doc
before searching click on all files and folders-more advanced options and check top three search choices hidden system and subsystem.if he had other file extensions just search using the * wildcard and then .
the file extension type,if you dont know the extension,search google using the program and it will tell you file extensions.
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