Cannot see the photos on hard drive

Phat Cat

I am currently trying to fix my fathers laptop as he claims that the 3GB on photos are no where to be found.

They are usually found on the C:\users\fathersname\Photos folder but don't seem to be there anymore.

I ran some virus scans and nothing came up, although the virus scan did scan all of the photos because I noticed their names and file paths come up during the scan.

I also installed WinDirStat to populate the hard drive and see if I could find the .jpeg images and low and behold they were all there. I could click on one and view it but when I went to the actually location where the image was on the harddrive it wasn't there

Does anyone know how this happened and how to correct it because I am stumped.

krusty_10

Any chance the folder or contents are just hidden ?
Go into windows explorer and look at Tools>Folder Options>View>Files and Folders and check the Hidden Files and Folders checkbox. Click Show Hidden Files and see how you get on. Check the attribute of the folder and make sure that its not hidden also.

A friend of mine had a virus recently that 'hid' practically all of his c:\drive and caused him hours of grief attempting to fix it. So fingers crossed.

Phat Cat

Thank you so much, that worked a threat!

The only side effect though is that the thumbnails of the photos are kind of hard to see if you know what I mean? It looks like the aero transparent effect is over them all, but when they are clicked on and blown up to screen size they are perfect. It's no biggie though.

krusty_10

Cheers - that transparent look is probably because of a 'hidden flags' some where else on the directory. At least you know the stuff is still there. Tip No.1 - Go get a backup of all of the pictures to a flash drive/CD a.s.a.p.

Phat Cat

Yeah true, I just thought I'd mention anyway because it looked strange.

Btw I've already made a DVD copy of them for him as backup.

Thanks again!

Phat Cat

I did some research on this and the solution is to simply uncheck the show operating system files (recommended) in the Windows Explorer, Organise, Folders & Search Options, then type these couple of lines in command prompt: attrib -s -h *.* /s /d

It works!