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Documents and Settings Folder is Missing

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by rui.f.meireles

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Hi. I had an old computer that run Windows XP SP1. A few days ago, the motherboard burned. I took its disk, put it in Slave mode, and connected it to another computer to backup some files.

The disk was detected, but unreadable, and I had to run "chkdsk /F" in order to be able to correct it. Since it had a partition, discs C: and D: of my old computer are currently disks E: and F: in my new computer.

Now I have access to them, I've backed up some important things, but I can't find the "Documents and Settings" folder. It simply doesn't exist! And I needed to backup Internet Explorer Favorites and "My Documents" folder...

It this normal? Or is it because I did chkdsk?
I would appreciate any help.
Thanks.

4 replies

by scott_heath

If the drive had issues the sectors containing the data or the part of the MFT that stored where the data resided may be gone. When you run chkdsk /f if it can recover data it is often in directories called folder000.001 or something like that. Do you have any of these oddly named folders in your e:\ or f:\ directories?

by mayhem1969

Since it was unreadable it looks like you had a disc problem. While chkdsk may have corrected some sectors, at least enough to read, it doesn't necessarily mean it corrected them all. Some of your data may still be corrupted or simply lost in chkdsk repairing the disc. Actually, it might not have even been there if it didn't save correctly to begin with.

I can't tell from your post whether you did a backup to this disc before your old computer crashed or if you recently did a backup of the "new" computer and your looking for that. It might be that the disc is readable but still bad and your data is being corrupted when written.

I would expect the slave drive in the new computer to have these drive letters and that the C drive is the current hdd and D drive the cd drive, leaving the next numbers for local drives as E and F.

If you can see the other folders under these drives that were present in the old computer, I don't see why documents and settings shouldn't be present. However, it may be that this folder is user specific in windows. XP allows multiple users to use the same computer, so it assigns this folder to different users. Once you move the hdd it is no longer running windows XP so user specific folders may not be visible as you would normally expect when the OS is running.

What you may want to do is search for that "user" folder (whatever you called yourself in the old computer) and then see if the doc/set folder is contained in it. You could also swap the drives, that is make the E and F drives master and the current C drive slave. Boot to the E drive, have windows XP sp1 load, and see if you can find the documents and settings folder that way.

by mr.sweetchuck

If no one can suggest a way to recover the "My Documents", you could use a file recovery application to dig out the files. I have used PCI, because it's freeware and it has worked well for me before, but they are plenty of them around.

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