Data recovery from Recycle Bin

[SpaceBoomer82]

A friend gave his Packard Bell laptop to me for repair, OS is Windows 10.

Windows 10 is unable to start due to a blue screen and error message loop, I'm guessing a botched up Windows update is the reason. There are 3 restore points created by Windows, so far none of them worked.

I could do a full reset using the Recovery partition, but there's a problem, my friend has a lot of photos that would need to be recovered before that... and here's the tricky part:

For some reason all the photos seem to have ended up somehow to the Recycle bin, I have no idea how, although given the fact that the owner of the laptop is not a very tech savvy person, he may have accidentally deleted the folder containing the photos without knowing what he was doing or that the photos were in the folder he chose to delete placing it into the Recycle Bin.

I found the files after booting Ubuntu Live from USB, but I can't open any of them, the filenames do contain the .jpg extension, but they are all just 1KB in size. Is there any way to recover files from the Recycle Bin with Ubuntu or Mini Windows XP that is in Hiren's Boot CD? Or do I need to remove the HDD from laptop and connect it to another computer with working Windows? If so, is Windows 10 required for that or would Windows 7 be able to recover the files?

 

[u2desire420]

Did you try to see if you can boot in Safe Mode?
It doesn't sound good that the pictures are all 1KB in size do any of them display the picture in Ubuntu? Check the /user/his login name/Pictures. The ones in the recycling bin showing up now could just be previously deleted files restored when you used a restore point which could be why they are all 1KB. Hopefully you will find his Photos in the other /user/..../pictures folder than you can move them to external storage or burn them to a DVD from Ubuntu.

 

[SpaceBoomer82]

Did you try to see if you can boot in Safe Mode?
It doesn't sound good that the pictures are all 1KB in size do any of them display the picture in Ubuntu? Check the /user/his login name/Pictures. The ones in the recycling bin showing up now could just be previously deleted files restored when you used a restore point which could be why they are all 1KB. Hopefully you will find his Photos in the other /user/..../pictures folder than you can move them to external storage or burn them to a DVD from Ubuntu.

None of the Safe Mode options worked.

The photos he claimed that should be in the computer are in none of the folders they should be, I spent a good couple of hours digging for them previous to my attempts on using the restore points on a command prompt I was able to get into using a Windows 8 install media, which I downloaded originally because I saw the Win 8 sticker, which ultimately was an effort in vain as I noticed that he probably had upgraded to Windows 10 during the time when Microsoft was really pushing people for it. Anyway, I couldn't find them using the command prompt, I pretty much went through the whole HDD and only when I had a look with Ubuntu Live I decided on a whim to check the $Recycle.Bin folder...

And no, none of the files displayed the "thumbnail" when I viewed the Recycle Bin folder, if that was what you were asking.