Missing Pictures and Music files

[Guest]

Greetings All,

I have a user who, all of a sudden, lost all his picture AND music files -
just the files, not the folder names. In My documents/My Pictures - all the
folders are there - just no pictures. Sames goes for his music. There are
no viruses, no spyware, etc. Nothing was changed on the system at all. Even
the desktop wallpaper choice was lost.

Anyone have any thoughts?

 

[Patrick Keenan]

Greetings All,

I have a user who, all of a sudden, lost all his picture AND music files -
just the files, not the folder names. In My documents/My Pictures - all
the
folders are there - just no pictures. Sames goes for his music. There
are
no viruses, no spyware, etc. Nothing was changed on the system at all.
Even
the desktop wallpaper choice was lost.

Anyone have any thoughts?

First suggestion would be to immediately stop using the drive and pull it
from the system. You must stop using the drive as a live system because
every action will probably overwrite erased files.

Install it on another XP or W2K system and if XP, first turning OFF System
Restore so it doesn't write to the drive. You can use a USB2/IDE connector
cable for this, and it'll be very easy and fast with no real modifications
to the host (except for disabling System Restore).

Then scan the drive using data recovery software, looking for the missing
files. If you find them, recover them to the host system. There is other
software available, but I have sucessfully used R-Studio. There's a free
demo version that will tell you what it can recover, so you can at low cost
(i.e. your time getting access to the drive) determine what exactly can be
recovered.

http://www.r-studio.com/

You must stop using the drive as a live system because every action will
probably overwrite erased files.

HTH
-pk