Help me recover my lost files!

I recently did an upgrade to Windows 7 on my E6400. I then foolishly did disk cleanup and deleted off my Windows.old files. Is there any way to recover these files? I tried system restore with no luck. Is there anything worth trying before I ship the hard disk to Driver Savers?

 

The first place to look is in the recycle bin. If there's nothing there then there are plenty of file recovery utilities around. The better ones do cost a bit of money but some will list what they can find before you have to pay. AFAIK the old method of deleting files still applies: The first character of the file name is changed to something like $. This tells the operating system that the space is available for reuse.

Ideally, you should pull out the HDD, put it in an enclosure and run the file recovery on another computer so you reduce the likelihood of overwriting your deleted files.

John

 

Data Recovery Software, Data Recovery Tools - Stellar Data Recovery

That is the one I use sometimes at my work. Now I will not say it is the best thing under the sun but it can get the job done. when I first looked into it you were able to download a trial version that will show you what it could recover but you were not able to save it.

 

That is the understatement of a Brit I suppose. Not booting from the drive on which this happened is of critical importance. Windows commits lots of data to the disk during bootup and shutdown.

 

I've used OnTrack Easy Recovery years ago which worked perfectly at the time. They also have the ability to create a bootdisk from another computer. However that feature is pretty worthless now though as it only supports FAT/FAT32 drives.

 

Hm. Normally, the Windows folder does not contain important data that is worth any effort of data recovery.

Michael

 

Generally, data recovery is rarely worth it. Cost is one thing, and if precautions aren't taken, the data will likely be overwritten or corrupted. My advice would be just to move on...