Help! Lost files

[gillimar38]

Earlier this year, my computer was acting up ie..long time booting up, crashing etc. I phoned PC World, with whom I have a repair contract. The fella on the phone went through several moves to try and correct the problem, to no avail. Eventually, he said I should perform a partial recovery programme. He assured me that I would not lose my files and documents. That same message showed onscreen in the recovery mode. I followed his instructions to the letter........and lost all my photographs! I was furious and PC World wants £80 to try and regain my files. I cant afford that. Since this happened, I now store my photos in a Web album.
However, I wondered if there is any way I might attempt to reclaim my photos, myself.
Your advice will be appreciated.
I have a Packard Bell PC, using Windows XP and Norton Security, with firewall.

[Steve]

Gill,

I have a few thoughts for you.

One is that no single method is right for keeping files safe. Some sort of Web album might well fail or vanish as the copies in your hard disk seem to have.

The normal thing to do with all meaningful computer information is to keep at least 2 copies. As well as looking after the original files you keep the backup one very safe, where fire or a single hardware failure can't easily cause you to lose the files etc.

Another thought is that if you have uploaded the photos here you can probably just download them again. We don't make promises about such things but even I keep all my favourite photos on here...and it means I have been able to download a copy of any photo I wanted from anywhere in the World for a very long time now.

When your PC started to fail copying off any material like photos would have been a great idea.. worth thinking about if it happens again, though normally it will be without warning.. and pretty well all hard disks will fail eventually.

Getting material back from a hard disk is an art and heaps of folks have some idea how to do it, and there is software about to help. Getting someone really into computers to look at your machine may be one idea... hopefully you know someone.

You'd think if PC World told you what to do that they would help for free. You could try asking to speak to a Manager perhaps.

I don't know where the disk is that has the photos on, if it is in use and on your machine you are probably removing all traces of the old photos as you use it..

A lot of members bring broken computers and cameras and similar to our subscriber meets, and we've seen lots done on hard disks etc over the years.

No exact answer for you there.. but I hope the thoughts help, and I hope others have some for you too.

Steve

[gillimar38]

Thanks, Steve.
I didnt upload all my photos here, so no joy there.
I agree PC World should have helped for free, but I spoke to the manager and he wasnt helpful.
I didnt really think I could regain them myself, but I do know a buff that could tell me!
Thanks for trying to help.
I have copied new photos to a disc now, as well as storing in a Web album, but its so infuriating that I lost them all in the first place. Once bitten........!
Thanks again.........Gill

[Andy]

Gill,

I see you got some good advice from Steve. You haven't said what happened to that drive? If you are not using it, it may be possible to connect it as a slave or as an external drive and use something like Photo Rescue to attempt to recover some photos, but that won't work if your old photo images are on a live drive that you are booting from.

Andy

[Ryan]

Gill

I have just recovered photos from a friends laptop using the methods described by Andy. However if you have formatted your hard drive since and put a operating system on since then it gets a bit trickier to recover them.

If you haven't touched it since then using it as an external drive connected to another PC/laptop running some form of recovery software should recover the majority of your photos.

I try to avoid PC World at all costs as they over charge and at times are very vague on the most basic of questions about computers and they seem more interested in selling replacement policies than actual machines.

Good Luck