Vista won't boot- need to recover important files!

MattD313 · 03-20-2009, 03:35 PM

Hey everyone. I'm posting this on behalf of a co-worker whose computer recently got damaged.
Situation:
He had told me that a friend spilled a little wine on the counter which then seeped underneath it. After a day of air drying and after cleaning it- it turned on but it wouldn't load into Vista. It tried to do a startup repair.
He brought it into work when our IT guy was there. He did some stuff to it (not sure exactly what) and told my co-worker when it's done to type exit and then re-boot. He then told him if it doesn't load into Vista, he'll need to take out the drive, get a usb adapter and plug it in to another computer to retrieve the personal files (pictures, documents, audio, etc)

We never got it to load into Vista. So he bought an adapter. We plugged it into his XP machine at work and were not able to find any of his personal files.
We ran a search for just pictures on the drive, and it only pulled system images and pictures that come on the computer or with software, no pictures from a camera or anything.
I plugged it into my Mac, oddly a few additional folders were visible that weren't when plugged into XP- one was a folder called $RecycleBin and another was the Documents and Settings folder, which was empty though.
No luck on a Mac finding any of the missing files.
I told him to try to plug it into a Vista machine and MAYBE other files or folders would be visible, but that I honestly wasn't very optimistic on that being the solution.

----

So- that is the situation. The contents of that hard drive doesn't have a dollar value, it is priceless to him and his family due to them having the majority of their children's photos on that drive.

The odd thing to me is that the Documents and Settings folder is completely empty, but everything else on the hard drive seems to be in tact.
My co-worker mentioned his wife goes on Facebook a lot and other sites relatd, which may have malicious threats. Could it be a coincidence that the laptop picked up a virus, but didn't do real damage until the machine was turned off, coincidently after wine was spilled?

I feel awful. At work I'm the one to go to with computer problems, and 99% of the time I am able to help. This time, I'm clueless and I know how important resolving this issue is. I have a son of my own and if I lost his pictures I would be devastated.

Could someone offer me some suggestions on what else to try and what could have possibly caused this? It seems like the wine is suspect- but how does it explain the Documents and Settings folder being the only folder that its contents are completely missing?

*sorry for such a long post, I wanted to include as much information as possible, including the urgency obviously.

TIA!

-Matt

**TriggerFinger** · 03-20-2009, 03:47 PM

Hi MattD313,

You said you hooked it up to another PC and you cannot find the files you need? Hmmm... may be the files were already deleted. For one, someone had already tried to 'fix' it before you did. The bad thing about that is that you also do not know what that other person did in his attempt to repair it. If you can see other folders or files except the one your friend needs then I am inclined to believe they were deleted.

MattD313 · 03-20-2009, 04:03 PM

Well my co-worker told the IT guy not to repair the Windows installation via the disk image Dell set up in a second partition.

Also- their are programs like Firefox and iTunes shown in the Program Files folders that wouldn't be there if there was a disk image recovery. (to my knowledge)

Our IT vendor has made some pretty big mistakes in the past, so it wouldn't entirely surprise me. Although, this IT guy who was out this time works a lot more carefully than previous people who they've sent in. (But that still isn't saying a lot!)

Anyway- when I walked in to see what the IT guy had done, the cmd prompt was up and it was running a chkdsk, so that wouldn't have erased data. I didn't see if he tinkered with it after that or not, but I really don't think he would have compromised the data on there since he was told those files were needed for recovery.

Thanks for the reply.

Anyone else have any theories or ideas?

**jenae** · 03-20-2009, 04:52 PM

Hi, if this data is very important then I would seek out a data recovery specialist. Unfortunately it may already be too late chkdsk is a powerful and useful tool however you need to know when to use it, in the case of a wine damaged HDD, the data must be recovered before running chkdsk. Most likely the damaged sectors have been overwritten and the data permanently lost. The way most of us recover data is to use a working computer and slave the hdd to the cd rom drive of that computer. There are recovery programs however as I said use a professional for this.

03-20-2009, 03:35 PM	#1 (permalink)
MattD313 Registered User Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 71 OS: OS X 10.5.6, XP Pro SP3	Vista won't boot- need to recover important files! Hey everyone. I'm posting this on behalf of a co-worker whose computer recently got damaged. Situation: He had told me that a friend spilled a little wine on the counter which then seeped underneath it. After a day of air drying and after cleaning it- it turned on but it wouldn't load into Vista. It tried to do a startup repair. He brought it into work when our IT guy was there. He did some stuff to it (not sure exactly what) and told my co-worker when it's done to type exit and then re-boot. He then told him if it doesn't load into Vista, he'll need to take out the drive, get a usb adapter and plug it in to another computer to retrieve the personal files (pictures, documents, audio, etc) We never got it to load into Vista. So he bought an adapter. We plugged it into his XP machine at work and were not able to find any of his personal files. We ran a search for just pictures on the drive, and it only pulled system images and pictures that come on the computer or with software, no pictures from a camera or anything. I plugged it into my Mac, oddly a few additional folders were visible that weren't when plugged into XP- one was a folder called $RecycleBin and another was the Documents and Settings folder, which was empty though. No luck on a Mac finding any of the missing files. I told him to try to plug it into a Vista machine and MAYBE other files or folders would be visible, but that I honestly wasn't very optimistic on that being the solution. ---- So- that is the situation. The contents of that hard drive doesn't have a dollar value, it is priceless to him and his family due to them having the majority of their children's photos on that drive. The odd thing to me is that the Documents and Settings folder is completely empty, but everything else on the hard drive seems to be in tact. My co-worker mentioned his wife goes on Facebook a lot and other sites relatd, which may have malicious threats. Could it be a coincidence that the laptop picked up a virus, but didn't do real damage until the machine was turned off, coincidently after wine was spilled? I feel awful. At work I'm the one to go to with computer problems, and 99% of the time I am able to help. This time, I'm clueless and I know how important resolving this issue is. I have a son of my own and if I lost his pictures I would be devastated. Could someone offer me some suggestions on what else to try and what could have possibly caused this? It seems like the wine is suspect- but how does it explain the Documents and Settings folder being the only folder that its contents are completely missing? *sorry for such a long post, I wanted to include as much information as possible, including the urgency obviously. TIA! -Matt

03-20-2009, 03:47 PM	#2 (permalink)
TriggerFinger Moderator Hardware Team Join Date: Jan 2008 Location: USA Posts: 11,846 OS: Vista SP1, XP SP3, PCLinuxOS2007	Re: Vista won't boot- need to recover important files! Hi MattD313, You said you hooked it up to another PC and you cannot find the files you need? Hmmm... may be the files were already deleted. For one, someone had already tried to 'fix' it before you did. The bad thing about that is that you also do not know what that other person did in his attempt to repair it. If you can see other folders or files except the one your friend needs then I am inclined to believe they were deleted. __________________ DBAN - Memtest86+ - BartPE - Linux LiveCD - ImgBurn - HDD Diags - Disk Copy HOW TO BURN AN ISO FILE Last edited by TriggerFinger; 03-20-2009 at 03:49 PM.

03-20-2009, 04:03 PM	#3 (permalink)
MattD313 Registered User Join Date: Dec 2007 Posts: 71 OS: OS X 10.5.6, XP Pro SP3	Re: Vista won't boot- need to recover important files! Well my co-worker told the IT guy not to repair the Windows installation via the disk image Dell set up in a second partition. Also- their are programs like Firefox and iTunes shown in the Program Files folders that wouldn't be there if there was a disk image recovery. (to my knowledge) Our IT vendor has made some pretty big mistakes in the past, so it wouldn't entirely surprise me. Although, this IT guy who was out this time works a lot more carefully than previous people who they've sent in. (But that still isn't saying a lot!) Anyway- when I walked in to see what the IT guy had done, the cmd prompt was up and it was running a chkdsk, so that wouldn't have erased data. I didn't see if he tinkered with it after that or not, but I really don't think he would have compromised the data on there since he was told those files were needed for recovery. Thanks for the reply. Anyone else have any theories or ideas?

03-20-2009, 04:52 PM	#4 (permalink)
jenae Mentor Hardware Team Join Date: Jun 2008 Posts: 1,308 OS: XP & Vista	Re: Vista won't boot- need to recover important files! Hi, if this data is very important then I would seek out a data recovery specialist. Unfortunately it may already be too late chkdsk is a powerful and useful tool however you need to know when to use it, in the case of a wine damaged HDD, the data must be recovered before running chkdsk. Most likely the damaged sectors have been overwritten and the data permanently lost. The way most of us recover data is to use a working computer and slave the hdd to the cd rom drive of that computer. There are recovery programs however as I said use a professional for this. __________________