On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 12:21:31 -0800, "Michael Solomon \(MS-MVP\)"
If, in fact, this turns out to be a clean install that wiped out your
previous installation, you might do a search for "file recovery" on Google
and see if anything turns up that might be of use to you.
There is nothing Microsoft Customer Service would be able to do, this is not
a function of the operating system and note, if you are unable to find your
files by running a search as I outlined, you will be spending a lot more
than $35 if you need to use a recovery service.
One defence against this sort of debacle is to keep documents and data
off C:, by partitioning the HD into separate volumes. That's been my
SOP since 1995, for this and other reasons.
However, XP makes this needlessly difficult, because the ASSumption
your data is on C: is hardwired into the OS, and is hard to change.
First: An end user generally has to use add-on tools such as TweakUI
to relocate what is referred to as the "shell folders", some of which
("My Videos") may not exist straight after installation. When using
TweakUI for this purpose, you'd be warned that what you are doing can
break things; appropriate, but off-putting.
Second: The settings you apply affect only the user account you are
working in. You have to repeat everything in each user account.
Third: There is no easy (or even moderately difficult) way to set the
OS so that all newly-created accounts will use your preferred drive
letter and path for these shell folders. As soon as someone creates a
new account - say, because Johnny doesn't like Mary's choice of
wallpaper - all your settings are lost, MS duhfaults back in force.
How would I fix this, if I designed the OS? Pretty much the way that
well-designed application installers work - by prompting the user for
such settings at install time.
TweakUI's warnings apply to changing these things after the OS is
already installed, because you can get your mileage; "hey, all my
data's gone!". It's far safer to set these during installation, and
then maintain these settings as the new system defaults.
You would have saved yourself considerable heart ache if you
made a backup of your files. Note the third line of my signature.
"Just backup" is good, but simplistic advice. There are several
things that go wrong with backup, so the system should avoid
circumstances that force you to rely on this safety net.
Tools
As it is, home users with XP may not have the tools needed to do this.
Perhaps the hardware lacks a high-capacity backup device such as a CD
writer, and then there's the fact that XP doesn't install the backup
utility by default, and that OEM XP CDs may not even have Backup.
That's before you contemplate whether MS Backup is fit for use - i.e.
does it span CDRs and so on.
Locations
Then the user has to figure out where the data is. It's not as simple
as grabbing all of "Documents and Settings" because MS's built-in CDR
support will fall over, because its workspace is *within* "Documents
and Settings". So the user has to drill down into each user profile
and cherry-pick directories and files.
It's not as easy as grabbing "My Documents", because that may be
bloated beyond CDR capacity by huge "My Videos", "My Music" and "My
Pictures" contained within this. Also, "My Documents" leaves out the
desktop and data stores for several MSware applications.
Now the guessing starts! Is it in "Application Data" or is it "Local
Settings\Application Data"? Should we grab everything there? Will
grabbing "Microsoft" get the email, or is that "Identities" this time?
Data Hygiene
This thread is about someone trying to kill a suspected active malware
infection. Why that should be so difficult is another story; it's
relevant to this one only in that the user clearly doesn't want to
restore the malware back with the data.
But embedded within "My Documents" is "My Recieved Files", which is
where incoming Messenger attachments get dumped. Incoming emaul
attackments are embedded within OE mailboxes or Outlook's .PST where
they cannot be scanned, and IE defaults to saving downloads in "My
Documents" too. So the chances of malware being located within the
data set border on the inevitable.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't make backups.
What I'm saying is that it's unacceptably glib to wave "you should
have made backups" as a generic blame-the-user statement when things
go wrong, because making backups that work is not a trivial matter.
--------------- ----- ---- --- -- - - -
Tech Support: The guys who follow the
'Parade of New Products' with a shovel.
