Apologies if this is not the appropriate 'group

[Jeff Boyce]

My daughter "deleted" her profile/user account and lost all her photos.
She's located out of town, so I'm trying to remotely diagnose and help.

She's tried her recycle bin and the manufacturer's help line walked her
through restoring, to no avail.

Dad's looking to be a hero -- any other things we can try to get her
pictures back?

Thanks in advance

Jeff

 

[John Inzer]

My daughter "deleted" her profile/user account and lost
all her photos. She's located out of town, so I'm trying
to remotely diagnose and help.

She's tried her recycle bin and the manufacturer's help
line walked her through restoring, to no avail.

Dad's looking to be a hero -- any other things we can try
to get her pictures back?

Thanks in advance

Jeff

==============================
Probably a dumb suggestion but has
a search for .jpg been tried?

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Jeff Boyce]

<!V8!> (the sound of hand hitting forehead)

Thanks, John!

Jeff

 

[John Inzer]

<!V8!> (the sound of hand hitting forehead)

Thanks, John!

Jeff

=========================
You're welcome, let us know if
the search finds the missing files.

Also, you could try searching for
other formats.... .gif, .png, .tif,
..bmp, etc.

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Peter Jam]

<!V8!> (the sound of hand hitting forehead)

Thanks, John!

Jeff

Jeff:
Respond back if that doesn't find your daughters photos. I recently
deleted my Wedding Photos and 3 years of digital photos doing something
even stupider. I got them all back 6 CDRs full.
Peter

--

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Peter

No luck w/ searching for the files by extension. No luck using Restore. No
luck checking the Administrator's desktop, Recycle Bin, or "My Pictures".

If you have other leads, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance

Jeff and Megan ...

 

[John Inzer]

Peter

No luck w/ searching for the files by extension. No luck
using Restore. No luck checking the Administrator's
desktop, Recycle Bin, or "My Pictures".

If you have other leads, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance

Jeff and Megan ...

===============================
Maybe this freebie will work if the deleted
files have not been overwritten.

PC Inspector File Recovery
http://tinyurl.com/70lc

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Thanks, John.

Jeff (and Meg)

===============================
Maybe this freebie will work if the deleted
files have not been overwritten.

PC Inspector File Recovery
http://tinyurl.com/70lc

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[John Inzer]

Thanks, John.

Jeff (and Meg)

===========================
You're welcome...let us know if you
are able to recover the files.

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Jeff Boyce]

Modest success...

Several hundred of Meg's pictures are now restored. Others are apparently
gone, without a trace. Some is (MUCH) better than none!

A couple undelete/unerase tools were suggested. One found missing files but
asked for payment to restore them. The other was straightup freeware.
Should my post-recovery scans reveal no added spy/mal/adware, I'll post back
with what we found that worked.

Thanks to all for the ideas and leads and moral support!

Regards

Jeff Boyce (AND MEGAN!)

 

[John Inzer]

Modest success...

Several hundred of Meg's pictures are now restored.
Others are apparently gone, without a trace. Some is
(MUCH) better than none!

A couple undelete/unerase tools were suggested. One
found missing files but asked for payment to restore
them. The other was straightup freeware. Should my
post-recovery scans reveal no added spy/mal/adware, I'll
post back with what we found that worked.

Thanks to all for the ideas and leads and moral support!

Regards

Jeff Boyce (AND MEGAN!)

============================
Thanks for the update....congrats on
your success.

--

John Inzer
MS Picture It! MVP
How to ask a newsgroup question:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555375

 

[Peter Jam]

Peter

No luck w/ searching for the files by extension. No luck using
Restore. No luck checking the Administrator's desktop, Recycle Bin,
or "My Pictures".

If you have other leads, I'm all ears!

Thanks in advance

Jeff and Megan ...

Jeff:
As I said I lost my Wedding Photos. I had backed everything up to a
CDR. Deleted two W2k partions and the formatted for NTFS and installed
XP. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking: there should have
been more than one CD for My documents. It has My Pictures under it
with 3 years of digital photos! sure enough the My Docs CD only had 2
directories in MY Pictures, there should have been dozens.
I downloaded a trial of Active Undelete and found the My Pictures
folder. Trial only allows 64KB recover so I purchased the product.
Download site is:

http://www.active-undelete.com/download.htm

It recommends recovering to another disk than the original so i hooked
up a 9GB I had laying around. I believe I recovered more than 90%. It
took a long time, but worth recovering my wedding photos!
Some of the files were slightly corrupted so I used another program i
have used on corrupt floppies for years called BadCopy 3.76 found at:

http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/?rid=BadCopy&vid=3.76&bid=0716

If you don't have corruption then you may not need this. I suspect
that since they were just deleted you won't. If you view the
recovered folder as thumbnails or try to record to a CDR, that is where
you will find out if they are corrupted.

I got 6 full CDRs of photos after doing all that to my hard drive.

And no, I am not associated with either company, but a grateful
customer. As you can imagine, my wife didn't understand how I could do
something so ignorant.

With Patience and Good Luck you should get them all back,
Peter
--

 

[Michael J. Mahon]

Jeff:
As I said I lost my Wedding Photos. I had backed everything up to a
CDR. Deleted two W2k partions and the formatted for NTFS and installed
XP. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking: there should have
been more than one CD for My documents. It has My Pictures under it
with 3 years of digital photos! sure enough the My Docs CD only had 2
directories in MY Pictures, there should have been dozens.
I downloaded a trial of Active Undelete and found the My Pictures
folder. Trial only allows 64KB recover so I purchased the product.
Download site is:

http://www.active-undelete.com/download.htm

It recommends recovering to another disk than the original so i hooked
up a 9GB I had laying around. I believe I recovered more than 90%. It
took a long time, but worth recovering my wedding photos!
Some of the files were slightly corrupted so I used another program i
have used on corrupt floppies for years called BadCopy 3.76 found at:

http://www.jufsoft.com/badcopy/?rid=BadCopy&vid=3.76&bid=0716

If you don't have corruption then you may not need this. I suspect
that since they were just deleted you won't. If you view the
recovered folder as thumbnails or try to record to a CDR, that is where
you will find out if they are corrupted.

I got 6 full CDRs of photos after doing all that to my hard drive.

And no, I am not associated with either company, but a grateful
customer. As you can imagine, my wife didn't understand how I could do
something so ignorant.

With Patience and Good Luck you should get them all back,

Congratulations, Peter, on a reasonably effective recovery from a
very bad situation.

However (!), with the price of hard drives at under $0.50 per gigabyte,
it makes sense to simply replace the hard drive whenever upgrading a
machine. The old hard drive can be easily (perhaps temporarily)
attached as a secondary drive and any files copied extremely quickly
compared to optical drives.

Some prefer external hard drives for ferrying large directories, but
for a new installation, retiring the old hard disk, with the potential
to totally restore the old bootable system, is a big win.

As more and more people have their family memories on hard disks, it
is only reasonable that multiple usable copies are _always_ kept,
with at least one reasonably current copy in a different location for
physical safety.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."

 

[Peter Jam]

Congratulations, Peter, on a reasonably effective recovery from a
very bad situation.

However (!), with the price of hard drives at under $0.50 per
gigabyte, it makes sense to simply replace the hard drive whenever
upgrading a machine. The old hard drive can be easily (perhaps
temporarily) attached as a secondary drive and any files copied
extremely quickly compared to optical drives.

Some prefer external hard drives for ferrying large directories, but
for a new installation, retiring the old hard disk, with the potential
to totally restore the old bootable system, is a big win.

As more and more people have their family memories on hard disks, it
is only reasonable that multiple usable copies are always kept,
with at least one reasonably current copy in a different location for
physical safety.

-michael

Music synthesis for 8-bit Apple II's!
Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/

"The wastebasket is our most important design
tool--and it is seriously underused."

Michael:
You hit the nail on the head, I just purchased a 300GB USB External as
we speak. Should be here this week.

--