My Pictures Mysteriously Dissapered.

Here's a good one for you. Yesterday it seems I had all of my photos in the my pictures folder, today they are gone.
Ok what gives where did they go? I had the screensaver running as a slideshow and I just noticed the message for the screensaver: no imges in c://mypictures...... The only thing I can think of that I did differently was to delete a useless thunderbird account that I made by mistake. Oh yes and the ower went ou while I was on the computer today. I'm pretty sure they are gone. I cant find anything on google relating to a virus that did this.

This sucks my girlfriend is going to kill me. I was supposed to print our New York photos up for her.

have you tried system resotre or searching?

I assume you tried the Recycle bin?

Do you have hidden folders showing? It's worth a try.

Did you reciently change the sharing options of the folder? I've noticed reciently that some of my main windows account folders go screwy if you share then not share them on the network.

Thanks for the response guys. Yes I tried searching first, then I tried a system restore to no avail.
How do I show hiden folders? I may have marked them as hidden by mistake but I don't think so.

Open up Windows Explorer, and select Tools, Folder Options.
Click on View tab, and select Show Hidden Files and Folders.

Were the pictures located in My Documents, My Pictures ?
If so, due to the power loss, Windows may have created a new user profile which would make it seem like the photos are gone, when in reality they're still located on your PC, somewhere in C:\Documents and Settings\<userid>\My Documents\My Pictures.

Looks like all my music has bit the dust too. My music folder is empty of all MP3's. I'm really starting to think either this is a virus or that someone has hacked my computer. Is it possible?

Mulholland said:

Looks like all my music has bit the dust too. My music folder is empty of all MP3's. I'm really starting to think either this is a virus or that someone has hacked my computer. Is it possible?

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Check C:\Documents and Settings.
Look at the folders located there. If you see folders with similar names (e.g., myusername, myusername.001), then Windows may have created a new profile when your PC lost power. If that's the case, then your files are most likely still on your PC, but are under the old profile (for your case in my example, it would be under myusername).



HTH

Thanks Marioh but there is only 'my account' and the 'all users' account there. I don't think windows did what you are saying.

Mulholland said:

Thanks Marioh but there is only 'my account' and the 'all users' account there. I don't think windows did what you are saying.

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Bummer.

Your only other course of action is to do a Windows search for the file extensions of the files you're missing (if your music files are MP3's, search all your drives for files with extension of MP3, if your photos are mostly .JPG's, search for .JPG's, etc.).

I'm surprised the Windows would lose your files like that, especially if the computer seems to function OK and if nothing else is missing.
You could also try and run Checkdisk and see if that fixes the problem (if file pointers are screwed up). If Checkdisk doesn't find and fix the pointers to your files, then you may be out of luck.

Is checkdisk a Windows application? If so where is it located?

Mulholland said:

Is checkdisk a Windows application? If so where is it located?

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Yes, it is. I've seen cases of missing files suddenly re-appearing after Checkdisk has been run.

To run it, just double click on My Computer, and then right click on the drive that you want scanned, and select Properties. Click on the Tools tab, and click on Check Now button. For the options, make sure you put a check mark in the "automatically fix file system errors" box, and click Start. Most likely, you'll have to reboot to let it run (the program will let you know).


edit: you can also select the 2nd option "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors", but if you do, be prepared for a very long scan time, especially if you have a drive larger than 100GB. If you do choose to check for bad sectors (which you should do once in awhile), I recommend running it overnight.

marioh said:

edit: you can also select the 2nd option "scan for and attempt recovery of bad sectors", but if you do, be prepared for a very long scan time, especially if you have a drive larger than 100GB. If you do choose to check for bad sectors (which you should do once in awhile), I recommend running it overnight.

Click to expand...

If you do this, don't leave the computer. It'll end up aborting, and asking if you want to schedual it to run at the next start up. Easier to do it that way, actually. It takes less time. Still takes a while tho.

Well I ran Checkdisk and selected both options, to no avail. It turns out pretty much everything in the my documents folder is gone. The only picture that survived is the one I had attached to my desktop. If anything, this whole experience has taught me to back up my important files as soon as I finish them and get them D'loaded. Thanks for the help everyone.