System restore all music, pix and files gone - help

neris

I used the system restore on my pc earlier for some stupid reason and when i restarted the computer i got a set up on scree which was not what id had before. all my music files, photos, docs are gone. my wireless adapter has been uninstalled and the pc is now throwing up norton and a few other icons which I never had. yesterday i did install avg anti virus and this is showing up on the desktop. The log in screen shows up as "the user" and just click in where as I had a username and password. Is there any way to restore the system back to the way it was this morning? without having to go deleting the useless crap on that shows up now and reinstall chrome and a load of other things i had

Fysh

It sounds like you actually used a Factory Restore option in the BIOS, tbh.

You might be able to get some of your files back, but the more changes you make to the filesystem the less likely that is. This means, basically, using it as little as possible for the moment.

My advice would be to use a different computer to download and burn GParted. Boot from the GParted CD and use the included Testdisk package to scan the entire drive and attempt recovery of files. You need to save the recovered files to a different physical drive - if you save them to the same hard drive that you're trying to recover data from, you'll be less likely to recover your files.

One more thing to note - TestDisk/PhotoRec can recover files, but not the original filenames. You'll have to do a lot of sorting through the recovered files to figure out what's what.

Good luck!

drag0n79

neris wrote: »

I used the system restore on my pc earlier for some stupid reason and when i restarted the computer i got a set up on scree which was not what id had before. all my music files, photos, docs are gone. my wireless adapter has been uninstalled and the pc is now throwing up norton and a few other icons which I never had. yesterday i did install avg anti virus and this is showing up on the desktop. The log in screen shows up as "the user" and just click in where as I had a username and password. Is there any way to restore the system back to the way it was this morning? without having to go deleting the useless crap on that shows up now and reinstall chrome and a load of other things i had

If you are using Windows 7 or Vista you can undo the system restore (via the same System Restore tool you used to do the restore - just look for the Undo System Restore button).

Otherwise - if it is not a Factory restore as Fysh mentioned above - you may have just had your profile changed. This would mean that all of your files are still there but you are logged on as a different user so they are not visible to you (under your current Documents/Pictures folders etc.)

First thing to try to do is log on as the original user as you did before the restore.

To get around this without 'undoing' - you can try this:
Search for an example music file or photo that you remember, note it's location on the disk.
- Open Start menu
- Click run and type regedit and press enter
- In Regedit, go to: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders
-On the right hand side, look at the folders e.g. My Pictures, and see which folder this is mapped to (under Data).
- Change the path to the one you found above (right click and click modify)
- Click OK.
- Close regedit.
- Logoff and logon, or restart the computer.

If this works then do it for the other folders that are no longer on your profile.

This is only a workaround - I don't know what happened originally. Don't do this without trying the undo restore and different logon first.