Old laptop hard drive going. Lost half stuff! Argh!

RebekahR

Hello!

My old laptop has been on the way out for some time now. Stopped working on the wifi, then the ethernet card gave up the ghost. On my 2nd plug in wifi adapter now. I am trying to get all my stuff off it on to my new laptop. All folders are set to sharing but it won't share my folders on the desktop. Then I tried to log in and it had created me a second log in account - The hard drive has done something as it's called windows.old as a new one. It seems I can share this though so I have been pulling stuff into this and copying over. I got half way through 14,000 documents when it just stopped. It said it couldn't find them. So I looked back on the old laptop and sure enough that folder was empty except one folder it had kept in it - which was also empty! Where has it put my stuff!! :eek::eek::eek: I looked back in the origional folder I had copied it from and that is also empty!

System

Restore using the backups you made. Oh that's right, you didn't back up the "irreplaceable cannot afford to lose" files....

Take the hard drive out of the old laptop, put it in a caddy so it doesn't make things worse. If you're lucky its just marked the files as deleted as it thinks they've been copied over so you can use a tool like this to recover them.

https://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

And once you've got them back then BACK THEM UP, preferably to something like a USB stick AND somewhere online like Google Drive or Microsoft Onedrive so you've more than one copy of them in case one of the backups fails.

RebekahR

I thought it would have put stuff in the recycle bin but that's empty apart from a few photos I had deleted earlier. I was just copying over to the new folder it had made for other bits I moved to the new laptop. But this was shedloads of stuff and I thought that would kill it to make 2 X that amount as its slow as it is. So there was me thinking oh it copied the rest over ok so this should be ok too. Hmmm lesson learnt! I have a really old copy from a few years back but I had a baby and then things went to pot. Needless to say I've lost some stuff related to pregnancy etc.

GunJack

First, don't panic. Open the windows.old folder, go to Users, open your username's folder. I suspect most of what you think is "lost" will still be in the sub-folders there...

RebekahR

GunJack wrote: »

First, don't panic. Open the windows.old folder, go to Users, open your username's folder. I suspect most of what you think is "lost" will still be in the sub-folders there...

Thanks. I'm past the panicking stage now lol. The only thing I value that will be lost is my pregnancy/birth pictures and I can get some from elsewhere. So not too dire. I just don't like to be defeated! There will be some other older docs/pictures too but if I can't remember what they are they can't be important right

I've downloaded pandora recover - then read the info saying not to download stuff or i'll overwrite things. Gah! So got hubbys external hard drive (Yes i'm on Amazon looking for one now!)

Downloaded the above too to go on the external and run that later. Sigh whatta hastle! I should have just used the bleeding external in the first place then I wouldn't be here. Only hubby said don't you dare delete anything so I thought would be easier to use t'network pc to pc. Ah well ... Live n' learn n' all that!

Yea i've looked under uses/my name/folder X. I see one more folder in that thats empty. Double checked too that all hidden files are seen but ziltch.

GunJack

RebekahR wrote: »

Yea i've looked under uses/my name/folder X. I see one more folder in that thats empty. Double checked too that all hidden files are seen but ziltch.

In the windows.old folder??

System

RebekahR wrote: »

I thought it would have put stuff in the recycle bin but that's empty apart from a few photos I had deleted earlier.

Not when copying a file, only when you as a user "deletes" it. The recycle bin is actually just another folder, a last "are you really sure you want to get rid of this file?" folder.

What happens in the copy process in Windows is the file being moved doesn't actually get deleted from the source computer when its been moved to the target but on the source computer hard drive gets the first character of its name changed to a ? making it hidden to Windows and the filesystem and available to be overwritten. The software I recommended doesn't take notice of the ? as an indicator that a file is hidden from the OS and can be overwritten so merely displays it as a normal file that can be recovered. It may or may not be corrupt depending on what data has been written since which is part of the reason you need to remove the hard drive from the computer so the OS doesn't overwrite any more data when its doing normal writes it does during operation.

Heedtheadvice

RebekahR,
You obviously have a problem wigh that laptop. The more you use it the more losses you might make.


Do not download or look for files etc. but follow Tarambor's original advice!! Taking out the drive (physically) will prevent the laptop doing any more potential damage ( In fact better not to switch it on at all till the drive has been investigated and whatever files are available recovered.)


Once removed you can then add the drive to a caddy (or another pc with a spare interface) and use a known good machine to copy over and find the files that might be lost. That way you minimise the risk of further damage to a drive that might just be perfectly ok - the rest of your laptop causing the corruptions!


Yes you should have had recent backups but, even though you may have lost files that are important to you, looking after your baby should correctly have been your priority. Lost files are not the end of the world in comparison.


Best of luck. Do post back to get further help if you need it.

RebekahR

I can see some photos but some of them are pixilated which is weird Finding some that are so old i've forgotten all about them lol! looked for a external hard drive yesterday on amazon so will get one when I'm doing a mass shop tonight :-)

I have so much stuff I don't know what I need to recover and what I have already now lol!

Are there any programs I can use that save them by their old name? Albeit with the ?in front? As the one I have here just shows it as file name 000123 etc.

Looking for a "caddy" now ... Test disk looks extremely complicating. Looked at some videos on youtube but it's not really making it any easier as they all do different things lol

Heedtheadvice

Not wishing to upset you RebekahR but either you have not read and understood what answers you have been given or you are just ignoring them?

agrinnall

Given that it appears you don't know what you're doing I would suggest that paying someone who does to retrieve your files for you might be a better option.