i got a problem with my pc - please help

[Alonso Fan]

right, basically, about 6 months ago, i formatted my pc and installed win 7 64 bit, and the harddrive was empty (as you would expect).

i put my documents and pictures etc on from a backup disk, and i deleted them off the backup disk because my backup disk was nearly full. (for some reason, i kept the pictures, about 10gb worth)

next time i turned my pc on, everything was gone, nothing to be seen, but the harddrive was still full of 15gbs of stuff. i searched all my pc using start menu and the search bar in documents (top right) and nothing was found. they're still there somewhere, but my pc thinks they are not there. so, i put my pics on again from my backup disk, and it added another 10gb worth of stuff to the local disk c bar which tells you how full it is.

so, now i have 10gbs of pics, and around 15gbs (or more) of stuff that i can't access, like docs, music pics etc.

please tell me what i could do

[rjsa]

What backup? User name changed?

Didn't it put all the suff under the old directory structure?

If you moved from XP to 7 the user directories changed from "c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME" to "c:\Users\USERNAME"

[Alonso Fan]

What backup? User name changed?

Didn't it put all the suff under the old directory structure?

If you moved from XP to 7 the user directories changed from "c:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME" to "c:\Users\USERNAME"

backup portable harddrive

and no, no username change, same user same everything,

and I moved from windows 7 home premium to windows 7 home premium

my pc was slow so I formatted it, and reinstalled windows 7 onto it


I pasted the documents in the documents folder, music in the music folder, and pics in the pics folder, and that should follow the win 7 directory structure, right?

[rjsa]

yep. Trying to think of something else you can try.

Did you try searching any file you know the name for sure?

[CBeck113]

Did you accidentally hide the data? Go to control panel, then file options (settings? - sorry, my Windows is in German ) and then, in the second tab (View???) and scroll down to the option "show hidden folders, data and drives".

It could help...

[Blanchimont]

You could take your harddisk and connect it to an other computer. There are USB cables that allow you to do this if you can't plug in directly as a second harddisk at the second computer.

Maybe through this trick the lost data appears again?

If this approach isn't sucessful, you could try to recover the data with the help of any of this programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_d ... y_software

[Alonso Fan]

Did you accidentally hide the data? Go to control panel, then file options (settings? - sorry, my Windows is in German ) and then, in the second tab (View???) and scroll down to the option "show hidden folders, data and drives".

It could help...

thanks for the help, but that option is already ticked and no documents or pics appeared yet

[Alonso Fan]

yep. Trying to think of something else you can try.

Did you try searching any file you know the name for sure?

yep, it says 'no results found'

[Alonso Fan]

You could take your harddisk and connect it to an other computer. There are USB cables that allow you to do this if you can't plug in directly as a second harddisk at the second computer.

Maybe through this trick the lost data appears again?

If this approach isn't sucessful, you could try to recover the data with the help of any of this programs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_d ... y_software

thanks, will try when i am free

[Richard]

Have you looked in the recycle bin?

[Alonso Fan]

yep, loads of times

do you think the hard drive's going dead?

it is about 13 years old, and only holds 60gb

[rjsa]

That's not a hardware going bad, that's software mess.

[Alonso Fan]

But its 13 years old

[Richard]

First step is to buy a 500Mb or 1Tb drive and clone your existing drive. At least that'll give you a back up. You'll also have loads of space to do routine back ups to prevent this happening again.

Then use a partition utility to see if the files are in some hidden partition on the PC.

[rjsa]

But its 13 years old

If your hardware was failing you'd be having lots of windows locking up on you, not being able to open/save files. Not the kind of problem you are seing.

This far in the game I'd recomend you hire someone to look at it.