Lost pictures on Windows 7 from power outage

marygg

Posts: 123   +0
Power outage due to storm. Came back on without pictures and documents. It's an HP desktop. Would a file recovery program work? I've tried some of the instructions online, but they don't work.
 
Oh mary; I feel your pain. Were the pics within one folder and now they're ALL missing?
 
Then you've lost all documents saved in the default location (which is documents). you may have other files, where you saved them to the desktop (my wife does this all the time :grr:) or other directories not withing documents.

I fear you have major issues as yet undiscovered - - do this:
login as Admin and get a command prompt (start->search and enter CMD and hit enter)
now type
  • chkdsk c: /f /r
and allow the system to reboot
when it does ( it will take ~30-60 minutes depending upon the size of your hd),
login as your normal account and attempt to access documents again
 
Before that, access the Disk Mgr (control->admin tools->computer Mgmt->disk Mgr)
how does the DISK0 show up; should have a couple of partitions, one (C:) NTFS, Healthy

then get a command prompt and enter
dir %USERPROFILE%\documents
is there anything there?
 
First, partitions healthy.
Second, Yes. Directory of C:\users\dotti\documents

07/29/2015 04:47 PM <DIR> .
07/29/2015 04:47 PM <DIR> . .
0 File<s> 0 bytes
2 Dir<s> 596,868,571,136 bytes free
 
Hmm; the partition is ok and that directory is just empty. Unless you have backups, you're out of luck.
The only choice is to send the HD to a data recovery shop and that gets very expensive. Last time is was more that $700
 
You have a strange situation. My experience has been that a power outage corrupts the disk partition table.
You're showing that it has emptied a directory and left everything else alone.
You also now have no sub directories withing Documents\ . . . was that true previously?
 
Don't know. She said last time this happened she hit F11 and everything came back, but this time it didn't. I've never run into this before. The computer and windows work fine, just the data missing from the libraries.
 
Hmm; Libraries is not a direct location on the HD.

The user's documents are and they are located at
  • dir %USERPROFILE%\documents

The Libraries are seen at
  • dir %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows
looking below Libraries\ we find
  • 07/19/2015 02:31 PM 3,968 Documents.library-ms
  • 06/09/2015 08:30 AM 2,970 Music.library-ms
  • 06/05/2015 10:36 AM 9,914 Pictures.library-ms
  • 06/05/2015 10:36 AM 9,329 Videos.library-ms
and we can not descend into nor DIR the Documents.library-ms

SO, what do you find?
 
btw;

A library's default save location determines where an item will be stored when it's copied, moved, or saved to the library.

  1. Open the Documents library

  2. In the library pane (above the file list), next to Includes, click Locations.
you will see where the default documents are stored; Mine are at \users\userid\documents.
Bet yours are somewhere else
 
That says your pictures and user saved documents should be found at
dir %USERPROFILE%\*.jpg

if you find them there, then
cd %USERPROFILE%
explorer .
<< notice the '.' period​
now you can move them where you please

I would suppose you want your pictures in the Pictures\ folder ? we need to make that the default location.
 
Evidently you're seeing something I'm not. Can you walk me through it? When I choose command prompt, I get a command prompt window that gives me C:Users\dotti>
 
That's correct and that is the value held in the variable %USERPROFILE%

At that prompt, type dir *.jpg - - do you see any?
 
Do you have a secondary (physical) hard drive where you can install Runtime Getdataback?

It might give you a chance, just beware that you install the right file format version (NTFS or FAT32)
 
Back