Instead of me continuing the game of "20 questions" by asking "Animal,
Vegetable or Mineral", maybe it would be better, if you would switch from
"Long story short", to maybe a longer version of what happened.
Off the top of my head: What were you doing with the computer Before, During
and After the point when the "motherboard burned out". Rescued the hard
drive how? Can you boot up your hard drive as primary from the other
computer, or put it in another laptop so you can view the desktop? (Probably
best to start in Safe Mode first.) How was your desktop setup: Normal
Desktop? Active Desktop? Remote Desktop? Is it possible the last gasp of the
motherboard did a "select all" and "delete" to Recycle Bin of your desktop
content? (Stranger things have happened.)
Have you checked for hidden files and folders? On my system, besides having
the same 3 "Desktop" folders you mentioned, there is also a hidden (and
empty) "...\Default User\Desktop" folder. The Administrator\Desktop folder
is also empty. The All User\Desktop has default icons. My Richard\Desktop
has those items that are on my desktop besides default icons. How are you
searching with the other computer, standard Windows Search Companion? Did
you click Advanced Options, and checkmark the "Search hidden files and
folders" option? (Setting Folder Options>View to "Show hidden files and
folders" allows YOU to see hidden files, not the default Search, unless you
are inside the hidden folder and press F3 key to start the search from
there, and the inner files are not hidden.)
Have you tried Command Prompt and "dir /s *.txt" (without quotes) and "dir
/s /ah *.txt"? Or: cd "C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Desktop" (WITH
quotes in that case because of spaces in folder name, and substitute your
name for "YourUserName",) and then "dir /s"?
How old is the laptop? Original drive? Have you allowed any data to be
written to your drive, since hooking up to the other computer, which might
overwrite deleted but recoverable file locations on the drive?
The horse is out of the barn, but for future reference, Backup Copies
(plural) of your "Valued Data" would save you a lot of headaches.
I truly hope a happy solution can be found to your problem.
FWIW. --Richard
[From previous messages in this thread:]
MBY said:
Thanks again for replying.
No, most were created with notepad and then specifically saved to the
desktop.
MBY
Elmo said:
MBY said:
Thanks for all of your responses.
I should have mentioned that I already ran a search on *.txt on the
entire
hard disk - none of the files I left on the desktop are on the old hard
drive
- at least not by the names I gave them.
And yes, I do know the difference between a link and a .txt file.
Any other ideas? It never occurred to me that these files would
possibly be
somewhere else.
Could they be .doc or .rtf files? That might explain their
disappearance..
:
Hi.
Long story short - my laptop motherboard burned out but I managed to
rescue
the hard drive. So I put it into one of those USB enclosures so I
could
access the files from another computer.
My problem is that I had some files (.txt files mostly) on the desktop
that
I can't find. I'm looking in:
\Documents and Settings\All Users\Desktop
and there are some files there, but they are all shortcuts - no other
files.
I also looked on:
\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop
and
\Documents and Settings\[my user name]\Desktop
with no luck.
So where are the desktop files kept on the XP file system? If it
means
anything this is an NTFS file system.
Thanks in advance for any help,
MBY
Run a search on the drive from the host computer for .txt files and see
what
comes up.
