OS seems to have dissapperared. Need help retreiving pics.

I have a compaq laptop running windows Vista and it originally wouldn't boot. It would only boot in safe mode. I tried running all of the restores etc but it still wouldn't boot. It would just sit and the bar would scroll across the screen but it would never boot.

After I had it going once in safe mode and then it said missing bootmgr. I downloaded a disc and burned it and got it to boot but when it did it now looks like there is nothing on the Hard drive. It is asking to install windows vista. The hard drive wasn't formatted so I don't knwo what happened to all the files as the HD looks like there are no files on it.

do you have any suggestions or ideas? The pictures are whats important to me.

Thanks

 

Do you have access to another computer? You could always add in the HDD as an extra HDD(as in not the bootable one) and then try and access it from the other computer.

Otherwise, have you tried booting into another OS like Linux and retrieving your files that way?

 

Thanks for the reply. I don't have another computer that I can use right now but I will get my hands on one.

Do you think the files would still be there? The HDD was not formatted.

Thanks for your help.

 

If the HDD wasn't formatted and nothing happened, then yes, the files should by all means still be there. Just that sometimes Windows bugs and can't read it properly and asks to format it.

 

Thanks. Could anything else besides a format delete all the files on a HDD?

 

If the hard drive were somehow damaged or otherwise faulty, that could explain what you are seeing (and would mean the end of your files possibly).

This tool *might* help you get your data back without the need for another computer (but will need a 2nd hard drive):
http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

 

Easy way then above. I sort of had the same problem as you. But I used a LIVE CD of Fedora 11. Booted Fedora Live from the CD and was able to get all my stuff back, of course I had a External Drive to load it on. Then reformatted the computer.

Fedora Project

Now they have Fedora 13 so not sure if it may work. But if you get stuck then try 11. Hope that helps

PS- if you can't find the files in Fedora then I would say they are gone.

 

Thanks everyone for your help.

 

Except booting into a linux distro, does it give you an error? if the boot loader is damaged than you can just fix it by botting from a windows cd (fixmbr command)
also even if they aren't visible doesn't mean that you can't recover them, a (quick) format should only delete the metadata (the info about the files)
so you can attempt a recovery , I doubt a full format was attempted as it takes hours (I did a full format on a 500 GB hdd once, if you want to know how much it takes try transferring 500 GB of data to it)