Are my pics really gone forever?

astonsmummy

Hi
I started up my comp today and it said i needed to do a sytem recovery, to cut a long story short I ended up phoning the tech guys and they said I had to do a full recovery, he said I would loose my files but I could take the comp into PC world and they would recover them, but they charge a silly amount.
I was just asking for conformation really as someone said the bloke on the tech line might of been trying to sell.
Anyway, is there seriously nothing I can do??????
I feel so stupid, I kept meaning to back them all up and put them all onto the online album but never got round to it.


EDIT: I am on Vista.

wooohooo

Not sure if this would work for you but you could try
type in RECUVA
I used this a few weeks ago when I deleted all my holidays photos

aj2703

There is a program you can download.

http://www.hirensbootcd.net/

Run it in XP mode, and it will create a dummy desktop. you should be able to copy all your pictures to a safe place.

astonsmummy

I am on windows vista sorry forgot to say

aj2703

just run it in xp mode dosen't mean you have to be running xp...:) my laptop is vista and i ran this program as instruced in xp mode and it worked a treat.

closed

Depends what you did, system recovery is a little vague.

If you restored it to factory settings, then you will be lucky to get anything back (it depends where on the disk the photo's were), but you could try this:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

The more you use it, the more you install the less likely you are to get files back, pcworld won't be able to do anything for you.

There is a recent thread in this forum, about backing up photo's.

MX5huggy

I am not clear as to if you have done the system recovery yet?

If not I would buy a new hard drive take the old one out and install XP on the new then plug in the old as a slave and hopefully you will be able just to access the files as if they were just on any disk.

davb

astonsmummy wrote: »

to cut a long story short I ended up phoning the tech guys and they said I had to do a full recovery, he said I would loose my files but I could take the comp into PC world and they would recover them, but they charge a silly amount.

Am I reading this correctly, that you haven't done the full recovery yet - if you haven't DON'T.

There are lots of things you can do to try and recover files, a lot depends on if the hard drive is faulty or not. But if you have important data, then at the moment the less you do the better.

If you post exactly what you have done up to now, and the make/model of PC, then there are plenty of people on here who will help.

astonsmummy

closed wrote: »

Depends what you did, system recovery is a little vague.

If you restored it to factory settings, then you will be lucky to get anything back (it depends where on the disk the photo's were), but you could try this:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

The more you use it, the more you install the less likely you are to get files back, pcworld won't be able to do anything for you.

There is a recent thread in this forum, about backing up photo's.

Thank you so much! I just done that and have got loads if not all of my photos!

astonsmummy

BTW I did do the full recovery.

davb

I am glad you managed to get them back.

I do find it frightening that the so called tech guys can ask you to do a system recovery without backing up, and then suggest a data recovery service to try and get your data back:eek:. They should at least have suggested you take the PC in before doing a system restore. These are supposed to be the experts - it makes you wonder if these people have ever seen a computer.