XP wiped out my Hard Drive

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Guest

I installed (supposed to just upgrade) XP Pro last night and it wiped out everything we had. When it was done, there was nothing left. We lost all docs, programs and everything. Word , excel, etc are gone & we don't even have any games anymore either.

Can someone help me here? Is there a way to recover this stuff? Thanks in advance.

Carly
 
brensmommie said:
I installed (supposed to just upgrade) XP Pro last night and it wiped out
Click to expand...
everything we had. When it was done, there was nothing left. We lost all
docs, programs and everything. Word , excel, etc are gone & we don't even
have any games anymore either.
Can someone help me here? Is there a way to recover this stuff? Thanks in advance.

Carly
Click to expand...

Sounds like you acccidentaly told it to perform a clean install instead of
an upgrade. If so, all your stuff is gone. You should *always* backup
important data before installing a new OS as this kind of thing is quite
easy to do...

Your games and applications will have to be reinstalled from their original
disks. Your documents & settings are gone unless you have a recent backup.

Sorry for the bad news...

Lorne
 
brensmommie said:
I installed (supposed to just upgrade) XP Pro last night and it wiped out
Click to expand...
everything we had. When it was done, there was nothing left. We lost all
docs, programs and everything. Word , excel, etc are gone & we don't even
have any games anymore either.
Can someone help me here? Is there a way to recover this stuff? Thanks in advance.

Carly
Click to expand...

The easiest thing is to restore from backup.

It sounds like, at the screen where you choose partitions, you selected one
of the options that isn't "use existing file system" (sorry, I don't
remember the exact text). That's the only option that will *not* format the
drive.

There are data recovery utilities that *may* be able to recover some of your
data, for example, On-Track's Easy Recovery Pro. This isn't cheap but they
do have a demo that will show you what, if anything, can be recovered.
However, the more you allow the disk to be written to (by things like an XP
install) the less chance you have of recovery. If you want a chance to
recover data, do not use the machine for anything but the recovery disk.

http://www.ontrack.com/freesoftware/
http://www.ontrack.com/easyrecovery/

If you also removed and recreated partitions, the data may be basically lost
for any reasonable cost (by which I mean under several thousand dollars).

-pk
 
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