My PC crashed, and when I tried to log back into my user, I got a message that said all data for my user on my HD had been deleted.

I run Win XP on a new computer. Now I know that in Windows the files are never really deleted and can be found with a program to locate deleted files.

Does anyone know of any such programs, and does any of you have any advice on what else I might do to acquire my lost files?


Please help, because I've got an English essay that is due to be turned in in few days among the lost files. Any help would be highly appreciated.

Hey, someone help this poor man!

He's in some real sh*t.

There are some shareware (such as file scavenger) and also registered programs like Undelete for NT. It works well, pretty well to undelete. Provided you have not done lot of disk operations that can cause XP to overwrite those deleted data...

Thanks for the advice, luckilly I haven't done much on my computer since it crashed and the files were deleted, so this might actually work...

Thanks for the support, Taggis! Appreciated.

No problem, might I suggest you try places like www.download.com? Might turn out to be your salvation. ;)

BTW, my report was a little above 3 pages... finished! Ahh...

Hint: Backup important files to disk. I don't follow this myself but I really don't have anything that I couldn't rewrite in a few hours. :)

And good luck!

WinXP ships with the system restory utility. If not everything on the HD is lost, i.e. if Win still boots you can use this program to at least get back all your settings and system properties. I am not sure whether it restores other files as well.

If the HD is totally deleted, take it to an expert. With shareware programs as mentioned above, you are most likely only doing more damage than repair, but experts can quickly recover most of your data, even if it was overwritten or the HD even formatted.
:D

Thanks for the good advice everyone - I was lucky enough to find all my missing files!