Recover or restore user profile

[Guest]

Hi. Running XP professional on a Pentium laptop. I looked through the other postings, but didn't see anything about this particular problem.

My company was performing a migration from one Active Directory to another. It entailed creating new user accounts and transferring the data from the old accounts to the new accounts. I ran into a problem with mine and IT advised to remove the account profile and restart the migration. When I removed the account profile, it also deleted all the items in my current account. I.E, all my data is gone. I know, I should have backed up, but that doesn't help me now.

I removed the account through the User Profiles applet (not the Local Users and Groups applet), so there is nothing in the Recycled Bin. System Restores to the most recent point and the system checkpoint didn't restore the data (system restore isn't supposed to affect data, but I was hoping for a miracle).

I've done nothing to the PC since the System Restores, so the data should not have been written over. Is there any way through XP or the XP CD to recover this data? Or is there a 3rd party software that I can use to find the data? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

There is no way through XP. There are 3rd party "undelete utilities" that may be able to recover some/or most of the files. The more you use it, the less likely you are to recover the data intact.

You might want to try File Saver http://www.file-saver.com/?afl=7673

Others may recommend other utilities.

 

[Guest]

Not the response I was hoping for, but thanks a lot.

Do you know if File Saver works with external USB drives? I checked their site, but didn't see a mention of supported hardware devices.

 

[Doug Knox MS-MVP]

Since the program runs from within Windows, I would assume that any drive the system can see would be usable by File Saver, or any other recovery software.