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Where is recycle bin/Data Recovery

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by wlewis

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Going through a divorce and I THINK someone demeted part of my doccuments!!

Running win2k Pro at home and the default user is called user. You have to ctrl-alt-del to log on. Users password is nothing and privelages are guest at this point.

Today I rebooted the system and when it came up the user desktop was reconfigured -- different than prior to the reboot -- and many icons were missing.

After some investigation I found that all folders below user under doccuments and settings were missing!!

I would really like to recover my doccuments folder particularly, the rest would be gravy.

Any thoughts?

Walt

3 replies

by stuart_at_oz

Your best bet is probably something like a 'recovery' tool - TUCOWS has many, (http://www.tucows.com/filerecovery95_default.html)

most of them are probably demo ones though.

Also try looking at NoNags under Diskmanagement (http://www.lisp.com.au/nonags/diskmg.html) - they only list free software, but they are a bit sneaky in that they seem to give you a bad link for download (to try and prompt you to join I suspect). If you go straight to the homepage of the author, you can generally download the program from there with out difficulty

eg, they list a file undeleter for NTFS from http://download.filerecovery.biz/

'luck

Stu

by joseph moore

Something else to think about is that, occasionally, user profiles do get corrupted when you log in. I have seen it happen enough times.
Try this. Double-click My Computer, then C: drive (assuming Win2K is installed on C: drive), then open the "Documents & Settings" folder.
You would now see the root folders for each user profile on the machine. There is probably a All Users folder, Administrator folder, and at least one Users folder. There is also a Default User folder, but that one is hidden by default and you probably won't see it.
Anyway, what can happen in there might be a Users folder (since that is your login name), and there might be ANOTHER folder called USERS.001 or USERS.002
Here is what you can try. Double-click each Users folder, then double-click on the Desktop folder. See if your missing files are there.
What might have happened is you used to use the normal USERS folder as the root for your profile, and all of your files are contained in subfolders under USERS.
But when you logged in today, your profile had a problem, and it made the USERS.001 or 002 folder from scratch.
It does this occasionally.
Yet, the files in the USERS folder are still there, waiting for you to move them into the new Desktop for your new profile folder structure.
Anyway, I am tired, it is late, and I am on my 3rd beer, so I am starting to ramble a bit! Check out the folders for similar USERS folders for your files. They might not be gone.
But, if no joy there, then look into undelete programs.

Good luck!

by kinetechs

On each hard drive, there is a folder called RECYCLER. each user has a sub-folder located there that is their Recycle Bin. Make sure you're viewing hidden and system files when you try to find the folder. Take a look at each folder to see if anything of yours is there.

Hope this helps.
Cheers!
~Sean

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