recovering failed xp repair

My sister has a 2 year old hp laptop with xp. She was complaining about how her DVD drive no longer worked. So I took a look at it and it was just a code 39. Uninstalling and reinstalling the drive didn't work. Editing the registry didn't work either. Being unable to resolve the problem, I did a repair install of xp via hp's recovery partition. All that sucessfully did was reinstall windows. None of her programs work, though they're still in the program files folder, and all the data in her my documents folder is gone.

I really don't care about the software because it's easy to replace, but recovering her my documents folder is important. Any ideas?

 

I've had some success with a file recovery software called RStudio. It's important to NOT write anything more to the hard drive. You will have to remove the drive and put it in an external enclosure then connect that to another computer on which the RStudio software is installed.

 

I imagine you selected not to backup her documents before reimaging? I thought HP gave that option, and the result would be a Backup folder on the desktop after reinstalling.

Unfortunately, you'll probably have to go with a file recovery solution, and after a reinstall that could be a problem. Good luck.

 

A reinstall will wipe the My Doc folder clean wont it?
Can you see the documents folder and it’s contents, occasionally monkey’ing with permissions can breath new life into a corrupt folder.

A method to recover corrupt files (if in fact you can see them) that has worked for me is to rename them before you copy them.
.doc et al MS products. Open with a text editor and rename the file extension to a .dll or whatever.
This works especially well with corrupt .pdf books.

Copy paste to a fresh install, or USB stick and rename the docs back – works. At least it has for me on various pc’s that are fallen.

 

I'm actually in safe mode trying that right now. What has me confused is every program she installed is still in the program files folder. Does anyone know if there's an archive hp creates for the documents and settings folder.

 

I agree. Swap the hard drive as slave to another computer and recover the files. Be sure to don't write on the disk so you don't erase other files. Also, before you do that, check the hard drive free space as the files might just be somewhere else. To recover deleted files, just google to get an app.

I remember to have restored my computer with HP. When it started again, the document folder was empty but I remember that I found all my files somewhere else (don't remember where). So check that first.

To search for your files, I just enable hidden folders (just to be sure), and starting from the C drive, I just check the size of each folder and I go for the one that match approximatly My Documents folder (or bigger) and I keep digging.