Disappearing files / recovering deleted files

Victor

Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Operating System Version 5.1.2600

I was working on a spreadsheet that was saved to a USB stick. Just as I was happy to send it, I rightclicked on it in Windows Explorer and clicked "Rename". The file then disappeared (no confirmation of deleting a file was asked for). When I went to "File/Undo Rename" (it didn't give an option for undelete), I get a pop-up message with "Cannot Undo Rename: Cannot Read from the source file or disk." Something similar happened a few weeks ago.

I suspect what happened is that as I went to click on rename, the PC took instruction to both rename and delete (they are nest to each other on the right-click menu).

How do I stop this and how do I recover the file?

Overheal

http://www.piriform.com/recuva

Future choices for better awesome:

http://docs.google.com

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-mesh?os=other
http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive

The latter get especially convenient because of integration in Windows 7, of course.

Capt'n Midnight

photorec should pull it back as long as it hasn't been overwritten
set type to just xls to prevent false positives
http://www.cgsecurity.org/

you probably know already but don't write to the disk , don't use any tools that write to the disk as they may make things worse,

Victor

I was able to use Recuva and get back what I needed. While it was only a partial recovery, I had a back-up from the previous day and was able to re-construct things fairly well.

Thanks guys.