Dear all,
Last night my friend accidentally deleted everything in the folder My
Documents from my laptop and emptied the recycle bin afterward. I am trying
not to panic and trying to find out what is the best way to recover the data.
My friend said that there is one last step needed to completely wipe out the
information and that he did not do that. If you have any suggestions for me I
would be eternally grateful. Here is more detailed information from my friend
about what happened:
I think the disk is FAT32, but it could be NTFS
The OS is WinXP-Pro
The Drive is a Hitachi DK23CA-15 (15.103 gb)
The files we care about are only
.DOC, .XLS, .JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, .BMP, .CSV, .TXT.
I sold my own laptop computer to someone a few months ago, then last
evening I discovered that I'd left just over half a gigabyte (3342
files) of my own old files on the system, so I deleted the folder and
zapped it from the recycle bin.
It turned out that the buyer had been storing new files she cared about
there instead of the Windows Default:
C:\Documents and Settings\a\My Documents
FixIt 5.0 was not able to locate or recover any files that she cared
about or for that matter any of the files in the entire directory tree
that I'd zapped, which was:
C:\My Documents
FixIt 5.0 found pointers to thousands of deleted .dll and other system
files, but all that could be recovered that we cared about was a few
.lnk files, which may be worthless, or may point to where files we care
about might reside.
C:\Documents and Settings\a\Recent\
Thank you so much!
Sincerely,
--Elina Niemela
elina@stanfordalumni.org
Portland, OR
Last night my friend accidentally deleted everything in the folder My
Documents from my laptop and emptied the recycle bin afterward. I am trying
not to panic and trying to find out what is the best way to recover the data.
My friend said that there is one last step needed to completely wipe out the
information and that he did not do that. If you have any suggestions for me I
would be eternally grateful. Here is more detailed information from my friend
about what happened:
I think the disk is FAT32, but it could be NTFS
The OS is WinXP-Pro
The Drive is a Hitachi DK23CA-15 (15.103 gb)
The files we care about are only
.DOC, .XLS, .JPG, .JPEG, .GIF, .BMP, .CSV, .TXT.
I sold my own laptop computer to someone a few months ago, then last
evening I discovered that I'd left just over half a gigabyte (3342
files) of my own old files on the system, so I deleted the folder and
zapped it from the recycle bin.
It turned out that the buyer had been storing new files she cared about
there instead of the Windows Default:
C:\Documents and Settings\a\My Documents
FixIt 5.0 was not able to locate or recover any files that she cared
about or for that matter any of the files in the entire directory tree
that I'd zapped, which was:
C:\My Documents
FixIt 5.0 found pointers to thousands of deleted .dll and other system
files, but all that could be recovered that we cared about was a few
.lnk files, which may be worthless, or may point to where files we care
about might reside.
C:\Documents and Settings\a\Recent\
Thank you so much!
Sincerely,
--Elina Niemela
elina@stanfordalumni.org
Portland, OR
