Compaq Presario Lost Pictures

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Heather - Feb 19, 2010 at 10:25 AM
 Blocked Profile - Feb 28, 2010 at 05:49 AM
Hello,
If you can help we would be really grateful. My Compaq froze after the Norton AV software 'expired' and they demanded £50to unlock it - and said there were 40 viruses in the PC.

Did a Windows Reinstall (automatic) and the PC worked fine. All my programmes are there: Outlook Express, Itunes, Firefox etc. BUT - all the presonal files are hidden - no pictures, no docs etc.

I understand this is due to Windows reinstall creating a new Registry?

The reinstall process TOLD US that 'nothing would be lost' - only the Windows programme would be re-installed.

Can you help?

I tried the REGEDIT sugestion but got lost in the details/

Thanks

Heather
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1 response

Blocked Profile
Feb 28, 2010 at 05:49 AM
Sometimes, you can recover files from a reformatted PC as some file recovery products are able to recover disk contents even after a reformat and even after a re-install of Windows and after partioning errors.

But it helps if you minimise use of the PC in the meantime.

The data may still exist on the disk, but not be marked as files. This means that the diskspace containing the old files is now marked as free space so it is available to the system for any new files to be written there instead. When that happens, then it becomes too late to recover your files so it is very important to not save any new files or data to the device concerned.

Use another PC to browse the internet for a solution as internet browsing causes lots of temporary files to get written to the disk. Download any file recovery software, for example, to a memory stick, plug that in the computer with the deleted files and run it from there.

One of the easiest ways to see if you can recover the files is to try some file recovery software.

You can try the free trial version of a good commercial product that will scan the device for deleted files and show you exactly what files can be recovered. At least that will show you if you can recover the deleted files at all or if it’s too late already.

You can find more useful information on how to get deleted files back here.
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