I Just Wiped Out my Picture Collection on a Vista Reinstall!!!

[NJCher]

Wahhhhhhh!!!

(Gnashing of teeth, back of hand to head, head on table, sobs)

I backed up to a Passport and when I did My Documents, didn't notice that it didn't also do My Pictures.

Guess all is lost?

Cher

[qanda]

1. Oh my! I'm so sorry to hear that.

I won't give you a sermon because you have been through enough, but you may want to try a program like Acronis True Image. It's worth the small investment for having peace of mind. Again, I sense your anguish and am very sorry for your loss.

[Prisoner_Number_Six]

2. Do NOT install ANYTHING if you want to recover your pics.

There's a good chance your files can be recovered, but the only real way to do it is to pull the hard drive and do a recovery operation via a second computer. If you start installing new software or even simply USE your computer now you run the risk of overwriting the files you wish to recover.

Turn the computer OFF now and take it to someone who is set up to recover deleted files.

Besides, to use Acronis as a recovery program you will need to have installed it and performed a backup previous to your accident.

[qanda]

8. I think you confused my advice for recovery advice.

I was talking about getting Acronis True Image as protection for future back-ups. I know that recovering information is a difficult and expensive process and I didn't see where the OP was asking for that advice. Sorry if I'm mistaken.

[Duer 157099]

3. What ^^^^ said! Stop using the computer with that hard drive, NOW

just STOP. The less you continue to use it, the higher the chance of recovering your data.

There is a very high liklihood of recovering most if not all of the photos, but every time you turn on the computer, even to browse the web, you're gradually overwriting more of the data.

[pokerfan]

4. Reiterating the stop and don't touch comments above

Use a different computer to download and burn to disc a http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page">system recovery CD. Boot from this CD. If you've never booted from the optical drive before this may require making an adjustment to the BIOS settings. Do not let it boot to Windows or anything that's going to hit the hard drive. (The recovery CD will run completely out of memory.) You should be able to recover most of your data as it's not really gone until it's overwritten.

[NJCher]

5. Wow, I have some hope

I had my picture collection on the D drive, which is where Windows installed the recovery. There is still a lot of space left there.

Does this affect anything, anyone?

I'm definitely calling in my computer expert now that I see there might be a chance of recovery here.

Thanks so much, everybody.

Cher

[Duer 157099]

9. If they were on the D drive, then they are still there

Usually, a system reinstall only affects the C drive. And you've discovered for yourself why it's good practice to keep your data files on a partition/drive other than C.

[madokie]

6. What I've done a while back is divide my hard drive up into a couple partitions

and put all the stuff I sure want to keep such as my downloaded program files and pictures, mail tool, on the partition that I don't put windows on. It sure has made my life a lot simpler. If you stop now and don't do anything else until you get an undelete program and run it you may have a chance to get most if not all of them back.

[david13]

7. I don't think you will have much problem.

One thing I found. My machine was totally jammed. A serious virus. I did a complete reinstall of everything.
Reformatted my hard drive, etc., and reinstalled all my programs.
Then, I reinstalled Picassa, which is what I use for my photos. Bingo, it found all the old photos and put them on my index.
Nothing lost.
Kind of amazed me, everyone said I would lose all my saved files etc. I ended up losing nothing. After a complete reformat.
dc