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I've accidently deleted my user area on my computer, now windows files are missing.

1K views 5 replies 5 participants last post by  Alt-rtt 
#1 ·
Okay, before anyone says anything I know i’ve already won the award for biggest computer fool on the planet. ):

Basically, I wanted to back up my files onto an external hard drive, so I connected it via USB and saw that it was full and I needed to remove everything before I back up again (I know! STUPID) So I went to the drive and deleted the file users. I have hundreds of thousands of files so I didn’t think much as it deleted 80,000+ then it asked me for permission to delete certain ones and I just clicked yes because I thought it was my hard drive and it wouldn’t be a problem.

What actually happened was I was looking at the wrong drive all together! That’s why it seemed to be full, because I was actually looking at my hard drive in my laptop. I ended up deleting god only knows what.

Completely unaware of this I turned it off, and rebooted it only to get a message saying – windows file is missing or corrupt

I removed my hard drive and plugged it in to another laptop via USB and it did recognise it but couldn’t open it saying - "is not accessible the file or directory is corrupted and unreadable"

My friend (who knows a lot more about computers then me) thinks I must have deleted windows files and pressed yes to asking permission to do so.

My biggest concern is that I’ve lost my work, although my friend says it should still be in the recycling bin or in its usual place. He’s convinced that all i need to do is repair the windows file and then it should boot up like normal, I can restore everything from the recycling bin and it should be back to normal.

Any thoughts on this? Is my friend just saving me heart ache or has he got a point?

P.S. I have learned my lesson, and I will definitely be getting a professional to look at my laptop.
Thanks, Jenna
 
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#2 ·
do you have the operating system disk/repair disk? if so boot to disk and do a repair install. that should get windows working again. if the files aren't in the recycle bin you have a few options to try and get them back.

Recuva - Undelete, Unerase, File and Disk Recovery - Free Download

is one option. I'm sure others will chime in with others that may be better.

first start with the repair install.
 
#4 ·
I'm not sure that re-installing, even repairing, windows and then trying to recover files is the best action sequence, because you may overwrite some files during windows repairing making them unrecoverable, which can be recovered otherwise.
I recommend you to reverse the order - first try to recover the files, then re-install Windows. To do so, you may try to use the startup version of R-Studio. The article Emergency File Recovery Using R-Studio Emergency explains how.
Although R-Studio is not freeware, you may well test it to see if it can recover the files before buying it.
And good luck in data recovery!
 
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