used hp F10 recovery - my documents gone

[wayne grauel]

I had to use a system f10 resotre on an hp pvaillion - basically reloads windows to factory settings... now for the fine print they do not tell you...

ALL OF MY Documents are gone.

All program files and driectories are still there (but wil have to reload to activate.

most cricial thing is recovering my documents folder. have not touched or loaded anything for fear of writing over any space.

has anyone run into this and what type of recovery should i do.
i do not need to recover all program files, etc

just what HP in their infinate wisdom was HP thinking?. Talk about making computers that have no consideration for the users. No options for a simple "repair windows" - NEVER AGAIN!! had I known i would have installed a new drive and copied my data off the old one.

nedless to say i have my work cout out for me

OK... how do I wade through to figure what to look for.

any chance that it can restore the folder structures, etc??? literally thousands of docs and pics, media, etc

looks like a cool program - just do not want to waste time doing what does not need to be done

Many thanks for anyone who can help.
Wayne

[GDH]

You should be able to recover all your files.

If you want to be extra careful then it would be best if you could connect this drive to another computer as a secondary drive. I say this becasue if you install anything to it you will be overwriting hard disk space and there is a small possibility that you could overwrite something important.

Download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles or use this link http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setup.exe

Run a "Complete Format Recover" search of the drive letter and search ONLY for the default selected file types. At the end of the search Recover My Files will rebuild your old file structure. Look in "Folder View" for your My Documents folder. Click on the files found to preview their content in the Recover My Files preview window. If you like what you see then you can purchase an activation key and save the files to another drive.

I hope this helps.

[wayne grauel]

Graham, I hope this helps too...

Thank you for "spelling it out for me"

I'll keep you posted. i suspect this is going to take a while and NO... I have not done anything since HP Tech told me how to really screw things up! other than load my video drivers... computer is totally off the web, etc..

Many thanks.. looks like a great product and I hope it works for me as it seems to for others on here.

Sincerely,
Wayne