Major problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter DebbieG
  • Start date Start date
D

DebbieG

I've got a mess on my hands. I was trying to uninstall an HP printer and I
must have answered something wrong because when I noticed that all of my
shortcuts on my desktop were gone I decided to reboot. When I did, a
message appeared to press R to recover or anything else to ... I can't
remember what it said. I pressed anything else and I had nothing. So I
rebooted again and pressed R, put in my recover disk, told it to do a
non-destructive restore. I lost everything. My documents is completely
empty, I can't reinstall Microsoft Office, parts of Windows is missing.

I'm assuming I'm going to have to totally rebuild which I have never done.
I've been lucky for 20 years. I have a backup of my documents but not my
Outlook Inbox and Contacts. I took it to Best Buy and they did diagnostics
on it and they only found 15% of my disk but no documents or Outlook info.
I had Windows XP Home edition and Office 2002 and lots of cool programs that
I'm going to have to remember that I downloaded.

I was in the process of making sure everything was up-to-date in order to
install SP2. I had bought an external drive and Ghost software in order to
backup everything in case something went wrong but it went wrong too soon.

Do you think I can take this to someone and they can find my files?

In the meantime, I'm using one of my old PCs. Someone please tell me that I
can get my Outlook stuff back.

Sitting here hoping,
Debbie
 
Look at the ads in the back of "PC Magazine" or "ComputerShopper" for
companies that can find and/or restore the info on hard drives. I'm pretty
sure www.ontrack.com is one but check for others.

It will $$$$ cost you.
 
Look for folders containing files with the .dbx extension. If you do a
search for files and folders with that extension on a healthy drive with a
good copy of XP on it you will find that the folders in Outlook Express are
shown with that extension. If you can find those folders, your Inbox, Sent
Items, Deleted Items and so on, you should be able to save them to a CD or
other media. You can also contact one of many companies that retrieve lost
data but you will be paying more than the price of a very nice, loaded, new
computer.
 
Thanks for your response.

For Microsoft Outlook 2002, am I looking for a .pst file or is it stored
under something else in this version? I only use Outlook Express for
newsgroups.

Debbie


Look for folders containing files with the .dbx extension. If you do a
search for files and folders with that extension on a healthy drive with a
good copy of XP on it you will find that the folders in Outlook Express are
shown with that extension. If you can find those folders, your Inbox, Sent
Items, Deleted Items and so on, you should be able to save them to a CD or
other media. You can also contact one of many companies that retrieve lost
data but you will be paying more than the price of a very nice, loaded, new
computer.
 
Search for .pst.

--
Curt
DebbieG said:
Thanks for your response.

For Microsoft Outlook 2002, am I looking for a .pst file or is it stored
under something else in this version? I only use Outlook Express for
newsgroups.

Debbie


Look for folders containing files with the .dbx extension. If you do a
search for files and folders with that extension on a healthy drive with a
good copy of XP on it you will find that the folders in Outlook Express
are
shown with that extension. If you can find those folders, your Inbox,
Sent
Items, Deleted Items and so on, you should be able to save them to a CD or
other media. You can also contact one of many companies that retrieve
lost
data but you will be paying more than the price of a very nice, loaded,
new
computer.
Click to expand...
 
I have an idea, why don't you -or someone that can help you out- use BartPE
or Knoppix to retrieve the files?
 
mak said:
I have an idea, why don't you -or someone that can help you out- use BartPE
or Knoppix to retrieve the files?
Click to expand...
If you did a system recovery on that hard drive, the files on it are now
G O N E ! Would cost thousands to retrieve it and then it wouldn't be in
running form. Most would just be unusable.
 
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