Missing data help please

jc4jax

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May 30, 2014
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4,510
Hi all,

On Memorial weekend a bad storm caused a surge on a the telephony line of my DSL and fried my router and my computer (rough weekend), however my DSL modem is still alive.
Using a dock, I pulled my HDD out of my defunct computer to pull the data off, but I cannot locate any of the documents/files. I changed owner and tried searching by document names and folder names and eventually found the "windows.old" folder which seemed to contain the folders I was looking for. However all of them contain zero data, 1 folder. I don't have any recent backup of the documents/pictures I would like to recover. Any help and suggestion on finding them would be appreciated. Once my new computer arrives, I'll be backing up more often going forward with this lesson learned.
 
they should normally be in C:\Users\****\ where **** is your username. if you had a password to the account it might not let you access them though.

the windows.old would happen if you installed an OS without wiping the drive first
If you install Windows 7 by performing a custom installation and don't format the partition during the installation process, files that were used in your previous version of Windows are stored in the Windows.old folder. The type of files in this folder depends on your computer.

if you havent used the drive in anything but a dock after the incident then its probably data in the normal windows directory you need and not the windows.old

if you cant seem to figure it out or if the drive seems to be corrupted, you can try using a data recovery program. some are free but the best i've found is mini tool pdr.
 

jc4jax

Reputable
May 30, 2014
3
0
4,510
I did at first, I went to the users folder but it only showed Public. There was no trace of my user name and I did not have a password for my home desktop. I tried using search for the entire drive for my resume which I had a few in my documents folder but could not locate it.