How to search all files...

[Howard Woodard]

I have lost the content of a very important message that was in one of my
e-mail (MSN) local folders. I want to search for it in the event that parts
or all of it are still there on the hard drive somewhere. My Windows
Explorer search doesn't appear to be searching every file -- for example,
there are some .000 files in the maildb that I can open with WordPad but the
Windows explorer won't find "contained text" in them.

Does anyone know of a utility that will truly search every file, whether it
be, permanent, temp, in casche, in the swap file/area, damaged, unlinked to
the directory, etc, etc. and give me the opportunity to recover it?

Howard

 

[orc]

you could try openning a dos window and using the dos find caommand:-

c:\system32\find /?
Searches for a text string in a file or files.

FIND [/V] [/C] [/N] [/I] [/OFF[LINE]] "string" [[drive:][path]filename[
....]]

/V Displays all lines NOT containing the specified string.
/C Displays only the count of lines containing the string.
/N Displays line numbers with the displayed lines.
/I Ignores the case of characters when searching for the string.
/OFF[LINE] Do not skip files with offline attribute set.
"string" Specifies the text string to find.
[drive:][path]filename
Specifies a file or files to search.

If a path is not specified, FIND searches the text typed at the prompt
or piped from another command.

hope that helps

Orc