Windows 8.1 crashed and User files disappeared...how to recover?

wb23

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Sep 12, 2014
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A quick rundown of the saga so far: During a routine windows 8.1 update on my relatively new Lenovo laptop, there was a disk error message and Windows attempted unsuccessfully to fix the problem.

Now on startup Windows cycles through "preparing automatic repair...diagnosing your PC...Attempting Repairs" The attempts are unsuccessful, and there are no restore points.

Lenovo sent me free Win 8.1 pro recovery disks overnight...BUT I want to copy my personal files before wiping everything out! I made a Puppy Linux live CD from another computer, it booted fine and I found and copied a few files to an external HDD, but the "User" folder(s) containing most of my files are nowhere to be found (I checked all 6 partitions). I haven't backed up files recently...sigh...lesson learned...

I have run Lenovo Diagnostic to check for HDD bad sectors - no bad sectors.

Is there another program or method to try to recover my files before reinstalling Windows?
 

TheMadMardigan

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Nov 14, 2014
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I know it's a bit late to answer this, but I'm posting here for posterity.

I was having the same problem on a Lenovo laptop (though looking back I may have seen it before also on a Vaio): Windows 8.1 cannot repair and won't start. Actually, it wouldn't even refresh. I removed the hard drive from the computer and connected it via a USB connector to another machine so I could pop open the partitions to see what I could find.

Short story is, there were hidden directories on the Windows 8 OS partition that were evidently created during a scan disk called found.000, found.001 etc. These are apparently folders scan disk creates when it can't find an associated location on the disk for certain files. In this case, all of the user files were moved to these folders.

I used a tool called WizTree:
https://antibody-software.com/web/software/software/wiztree-finds-the-files-and-folders-using-the-most-disk-space-on-your-hard-drive/
(Note that I think you can alternatively also boot to Ubuntu and see all of these same "found" directories. Also note that when I booted to Ubuntu, I had to manually mount the Windows 8 OS partition as read only because Windows 8 had been hibernated previously.)

When checking the Windows 8 OS partition with WizTree, I could see all of the "found.###" directories. Opening them up one by one, I eventually came across my user files and folders (on this hard drive, they first began to appear in "found.004").

Another great tool for searching through the "found" folders is total commander:
http://www.ghisler.com/

You have to tell it to display hidden files/folders. But once you do you can see the "found" folders and search by extension or file name (for example, search for "*.docx" to locate office files and therefore, likely, your documents folder) to more quickly locate what you are looking for since looking purely through WizTree you have to open the directories one by one and there are ton of them. You can copy files straight from total commander.

Hope this helps someone someday.