Please Help Me!!!!!

[gennyl]

I have managed to lose all of my daughters photographs from when she was born until today.

Basically my machine has been playing up for a while and I attempted to create a 'things to move' folder on the desktop to send all my important stuff too for when my external hard drive arrives on Monday. However I stupidly copied all of the data from the 'my documents' folder that sat on my desktop. This contained 'my desktop' and things spiraled as the 'things to move' folder was on the desktop but now also contained my desktop within it. Loads of error messages came up and I tried to back track by moving everything to a new location directly on the C: Drive.

I went to check the data tonight and couldn't find my daughters pics (they were stored in their own folder on the desktop itself) so i clicked the start button and typed the name of them. Low and behold in the search results all of my pictures appeared BUT only the thumbnails of them. If you click on the image to open it, it says it has been deleted or moved. It refers to the file name my documents/desktop/things to move/desktop/things to move/desktop......yadiyadiyada and despite searching everywhere I can't find the originals.

I have tried a PC recovery piece of software and that can find the folder but when I restore the folder, the pics aren't in there.

I have resigned myself to losing the original files but surely as I can see the thumbs on windows vista indexed searching, i must be able to get a smalll copy of the image? I have tried looking for the thumb.db file and have unhidden all my folders and files but I can't find anything.

Can anyone help?

THanks

Lynne

 

[AstaLaVista]

I am no Vista expert so I'll let those that are guide you much better, meanwhile, my only suggestion is this... DO NOT attempt to re move, delete or copy anything else until you know what you will need to do.

There is an application I used (in XP though) that it was called something like "Ontrack Easy Recovery", with this app I was able to recover about 95% of the images I had lost due to a Dead Hard Drive. My wife was almost at the point of divorcing me for it and I owe my life to this app.

Now, I don't know if this will work or if this is really needed since it seems you (or rather Vista) has misplaced your files or folders.

I still find it hard to navigate on vista sometimes and there are still gray areas that I can't go because it will give me the dreaded "Access is Denied" error.

Keep your cool about it and someone here will find the solution for you. God only knows I have asked multiple questions here and 95% of the time, I have always found and answer.

 

[eknirb]

system restore?

 

[Barman58]

As we are talking Vista Ultimate Here would shadow copy be of some use? Not an ultimate user so not sure?

 

[Fumz]

First, breath... we'll sort this out. Second, DO NOT write to your drive; you don't want to risk overwriting your pictures, which will make them forever unrecoverable.

Do you recall where, exactly, since your external won't arrive until tomorrow, you attempted to save the files to?

Do you have access to another computer?

 

[Chappy]

The system file pointers have been altered it seems, did you "Copy" data as you stated above, or actually "Moved" it as would seem to be the case?
Copying data should not cause this type of issue, moving it will change the system pointers when you move system files like the Documents, or Desktop folders since they are system folders.

Since you have Vista and you are using terms like "MY" Documents and "MY" Desktop, are these folders you created yourself? Vista doesn't use those terms for it's user folders and desktop folder so I would assume (possibly incorrectly tho) that these are folders you created yourself. Can you clarify if these are user created or actually the Vista system user folders, this can help track them down?

 

[darvesh88]

all right take a big breath and no matter what happens DONT WRITE TO THE DRIVE. I am willing to bet your stuff is still there. A program mentioned above Ontrack recovery can recover almost any deleted file for sure even off formatted drives. I've been able to recover files intact. I am going to PM you my email here because your files seem pretty important, give me a shout and I will give you the software and guide you through recovering them. On a side note, My guess is windows vista uses my documents my music etc as place holders for the real folders which are documents, music so on. What I think happened is you moved the placeholder folder which is hidden by default but if you have show hidden folders it will show them. Once you moved them. The placeholders became invalid and set off a chain reaction which removed from the real folders as well because they are both linked. Just a guess but I don't mind helping you out, happens to a lot of people even system adminitrators. I am going to PM you my email ok.

Good Luck
Darvesh

 

[Chappy]

Hi Darvesh

While it's great of you to want to help, please don't email private files to users thru the PM system. If you have a link to where the person can download the program, please supply that instead, and if it's not a Free program then mention that to the user but Never email a cracked program (or even a Free one) to our members.

With only 22 posts to your credit here, we are not entirely sure how trustworthy you are at this point and would prefer if you kept everything above board and on the forum boards so that it helps others and can be checked out if needed. Please don't take that as a personal attack, it is the same for anyone here, including me or any other long time member. Things should ALWAYS be kept in the public eye here for security reasons, and that also helps your reputation here with ALL users, the new and the old(er)..

Now, I also agree with you that it's entirely possible that this poster tried to move the system "junctions", the "My Documents" shortcut that the system uses to give Vista compatibility with XP programs and such. That will definitely mess things up, but we need more input from the poster about this to be sure.

The data is most likely still there to be recovered, but this still won't fix the underlying cause of why this is happening, and we need gennyL to post back here so we can look after this, so if you guys are communicating via PM or email, please bring it back to the forums where it should be.

Thanx

 

[darvesh88]

Hi Darvesh

While it's great of you to want to help, please don't email private files to users thru the PM system. If you have a link to where the person can download the program, please supply that instead, and if it's not a Free program then mention that to the user but Never email a cracked program (or even a Free one) to our members.

Thanx

Hi Chappy,
I did not send him any files, free/cracked via any messaging system on Vistax64.com. I don't even know if you can send files via PM. I sent him one PM and that was my own email. The communication was taken to my email because I do have a link to the software but its my own site which is password protected and I would rather not post my site address and its user/pass for everyone to know so I sent him a PM with my email, further in the email I gave him the link. Whats wrong with that? I own the legit key of the software (corporate license via my company). As far as regarding 22 posts and me not being trust worthy, I joined this site 2 days ago and have tried helping out others that is all. If you feel that I do not belong on this site, kindly delete my account. I do not take this as a personal attack, I was just trying to do my best to help him out. Furthermore if I did do something wrong, I apologize, it was a mistake.

 

[Chappy]

Hi Darvesh

It's not just thru the PM system I meant, it's anything sent thru email outside of the forums.

Now, about the link to your personal site that you want to keep private, that's fine but put that in your posts in the future please because no forum likes it when the help starts moving to PM or email as that's not how these things work. Explaining that little thing will go along way to letting the forum Staff know why you want to move this to email temporarily, and that's fine as long as that user is Ok with it too.

Don't get me wrong, you can have 50,000 posts somewhere else, but when someone new to a forum comes in and tries to take people to email and start mailing programs to them, we just don't know you well yet and we have to be a bit leery of the motives at times. I've been doing Tech forums for 14 years and have seen my share of "Fly-in" helpers who simply tried to snag a few users to dump a trojan onto their systems, so we learn to keep things on the forums at all times so everything can be scrutinized properly. Not a slight against you at all, you could be the most trustworthy person alive...but we just don't know that yet after 2 days and 22 posts...right? Please understand that, it's the only way these kind of forums work.

There will be no account deleting or anything like that dude, I just post this to help you understand what this can look like to others here. You're more than welcome to help other users here and we appreciate the effort, we also just have to ensure the safety of all the users here because many of them don't realize the dangers that can lurk...even at a forum such as this. It's Public and therefore carries all the dangers of any Public site while surfing, and going email is always something to be wary of.

I hope you understand our concerns and why I had to point them out Darvesh. Again, it's nothing personal, it's simply the way we have to be for everyone.
Once gennyL has a chance to try your program out, I hope she comes back with good news and then we can work to find out why she had these problems in the first place. I still like your thoughts on the "My Documents" junction shortcut that Vista uses for compatability that could very well be what happened, except she used "My Pictures" too that doesn't have that shortcut...hmm.