How do I retrieve photos from my restored hard drive?

Question

I had to restore my PC (an HP pavillion). It said that any data files that I created (not sure what these are) would still be intact, but anything I installed into my PC, even updates, would be lost. Well, all of my "data" files are gone, but some programs that I installed were still there. Someone told me that there was a chance that all of my photos were still on my hard drive. If so, how do I try to retrieve them?
Thanks,
LLkoolmom5

Answer 1

Unless you want to pay big bucks for a data recovery service you won't.

To avoid this problem in future, start saving your photos and documents to a CD or DVD RW. you can continue to add to these until they are full. If you crash your PC again, your important stuff will already be saved.

I hope this is helpful. Good luck.

Answer 2

I recently had my file system corrupted when my mother-in-law sat at the chair and bumped the reset button while the system was in the middle of a defrag. I fortunately had a backup of all the photos but I wasn't as diligent on the email (backup was roughly a month old). Initially I thought I could go without the lost month of emails until my wife realized that she needed something from one of them. Well at that point, I had already formatted the disk and did a fresh installation of MS Windows XP. I went to Best Buy and purchased an application called RecoverMyFiles. The application support file recovery even from a reformatted disk (NOTE: this only works if the file hasn't been truly overwritten...file pointers may be lost but the data could still be on the disk, just not visible to the end user). I was able to recover the latest mail files after using the low level recovery option from the software. Oh, the software can run directly from CD so as someone above mentioned, stop using the system (i.e. don't install any other application, data, temp files, etc...) until you can recover the photos you want. The software was less than $40 if I remember correctly. Good luck.

Answer 3

first off DONT save anymore files on ur hard drive... as you could be over writing ur files (photos)

now u have to ask urself, how import are the photos that u may have lost... there are basically two routes you can take. Try to do it yourself or have a professional do it.. in any event google "recover lost photos on hard drive", there are applications that can recover images (photos) that u can buy, some are free, some will scan ur computer first and show u what it finds (small thumbnail) then u have to pay for the software to recover them. If you fell you can manage that then that is how i would proceed. If you dont feel confortable, you can always send you hard drive into one of the Pro's and have them recover them

in the future, always back up ur photos on a DVD. Burners and disks are cheap nowdays...

good luck!
-o

Answer 4

They lied big time. Photos are not retained with HP recoveries. If you have even a prayer of those photos being around simply enter .jpg in the start up search field and siff through the piles of jpgs that it finds to see if any of them are what your looking for. Be warned that your results will be huge since ever jpg on your computer will show up even those used to create your software operating pages and banners and icons etc.

Answer 5

1- There are some softwares on internet which can access back ur previous documents which were lost...but problem with those programs are "they retrieve them from garbage of hard drive..and be sure u will not be able to open it back even if u retrieve through them..so keep in mind...

2-open system tool>system restore again ...now there would be another other option like "undo changes"..just click it...u will be back...now all ur recently data back up in ".zip" or ".rar" format..because if u wont do like this ...those data again lost because i know ur those data are trap from ur "previous checkpoint"and "recent checkpoint of ur system"..so back up then restore back..bye

Answer 6

Hi

Ok , try this first , open my computer then open your hd , there it should be a folder name documents and setting , open it there should be your old user . Now , sometimes when you do a restore what it does is that it RENAMES the folder so that YOU DONT loose your info , so , for instance if your user was JEFF , then it should be like jeff.windows or jeff.new depending on the restore

Answer 7

Try GetDataBack.