Lost files, XP

[josbd]

Trying to help a friend out here. He seems to have a faulty usb slot which, when he plugged his mp3 player into, crashed the pc, and when rebooted, xp has reset itself, changing the date to 20085 (!). More importantly he has lost a lot of very important work documents. I can't use system restore, since each time this has happened, restore points have been cleared.

He really desperately needs these files back.

If anyone could help, I would be more than grateful!

 

[Samstoned]

don't write to the drive
mount the drive in another machine
use recovery software to extract data
you may not need to use recovery softwres if the file system is intact
the new OS will see it just save the data
put the drive back in the old machine reinstall os from scratch that means erase existing partitions and reformat drive and then load OS

 

[josbd]

Brilliant. Exactly what I needed to know.

Thank you very much!