Help! I've Lost Everything!

[ali...]

Hi,

I really hope someone can help with this. I accidently sent my computer into 'System Restore' without backing anything up, I know - big mistake.

Obviously, I lost everything - photographs, music, work, email contacts, the works. I had it repaired and the guy changed the motherboard and somehow managed to get back some of my files.

When I turned on the computer there was one file named 'Recovered Data', inside were 15 sub-files:

GIF files (5927)
JPEG Graphics file (14758)
WAVE sound (7916)
Bitmap Image (2921)
JPEG Camera file (401)
MPEG Audio Layer3 (310)
PNG Image (4609)

All of which I CAN open and:

AVI Clip (109)
Office Excel Documents (1)
Office WORD Documents (8)
Outlook Express Data File (179)
ZIP file (513)
Office PowerPoint Document (1)
Outlook Data file (3)
winRAR file (132)

All of which I CANNOT open.

I don't even know what these files are, i'm hoping they're the ones i'm trying to get back. Any ideas how I can open them? Particularly the ZIP files, winRARE files and Outlook Express Data file.

Any advice welcome.

Thanks all

 

[WinXPert]

What do you mean you cannot open the files. If you have WinZIp or WinRAR launch it and change the association to all archive types.

 

[ali...]

What do you mean you cannot open the files. If you have WinZIp or WinRAR launch it and change the association to all archive types.

I've tried everything to open these files. Is it possible that I do not have WinZip or WinRAR. Sorry, I am a computer *****!

 

[mailpup]

You should be able to open zip files by double clicking on them in Windows XP and Vista. They come with zip support built-in. Alternately, you can right click on the zip file and choose the extract option. For rar files you will have to install an archive utility that supports rar. There free ones available on the internet that do. I've used Zip Genius. 7-Zip is also good. Both are free.

For Word, Excel and Powerpoint you would have to have those programs installed OR you can simply download a free reader for each of those programs (three separate programs) from Microsoft's website. They are called Word reader, Excel reader and ...wait for it....Powerpoint reader. You can read the files but you can't edit or create them.

For Outlook Express you have to find the place that OE places those files and then move them there. They could be address files or they could be email files. I don't have OE installed on this computer so I can't look up where they go at the moment.

 

[PortraitProAlex]

Were the files in the folders that you can open the ones you wanted to recover? If so, it's a good bet the ones you can't open are the one you want too.