Help! Repair Recovered CR2 & JPGS!

[stefike13]

last weekend i decided to do some pre-spring cleaning on my computer, i thought i was deleting some random empty folder and when the harmless "are you sure you want to delete this folder" window popped up i just hit "yes"

just as the little folder was about to disappear forever, the file name flashed "Pictures" and poof it was gone. at this point i was still in denial. i figured maybe there was a duplicate "Pictures" folder but that couldn't have been the one i had deleted. it disappeared instantly like there was nothing in it. surely if it contained over 5000 files (now closer to 8000) it would have showed a progress bar i could have canceled, something! i hesitantly opened my pictures folder.... and... it was empty.

i instantly checked the recycling bin and guess what... NOT THERE... i searched for the files... they show up like they are still on my hard drive but you can't open them... "this file has been deleted or moved"... now i just want to clarify that the file "Pictures" would have contained over 8,000 jpg., avi., mov., psd., cr2. files and who knows what else. there was no progress bar.. i can't imagine how my computer could instantly deleted all those files... plus my hard drive is still full... are these pictures still on my computer somewhere???

after hours of dell software tech support, unsuccessfully restoring my computer back to a previous day, running 2 files restore programs on my hard drive (and my 16GB CF card), i was able to recover about 80,000 files. now only about 20% of these files are jpgs and cr2 files that will open. the rest seemed to be temporary internet files. i have been left with A LOT of files that will not open. they seem to be corrupted now. is there any way to further recover these files?

Sorry for the rant.. as you can imagine losing THAT many files is quite scary!!! I'm really only worried about the CR2 files and repairing the files that were recovered. Any suggestions would be MUCH APPRECIATED!

Thanks,
Stephanie

[GDH]

Hi,

When this sort of thing happens, it is best not to listen to a technical support person who says to restore your computer back to the previous day.

The best thing you can do is very little!

The more that you write to you restore, move, copy, use a computer after a disaster, the more data is written to the hard disk, the more the contents of the hard disk is changed, and the more difficult it becomes to get them back.

The best advice is to limit the use of your computer. The best methodology if you have lost files from your Windows drive, if you have the resources and the technical skill to do this, is to take the hard drive and connect it to another computer as a secondary drive, and run the recover there. This stops Windows, or you, from dumping data onto your C drive and overwriting or destroying deleted files.

In your situation, please download Recover My Files from http://download.getdata.com/RecoverMyFiles-Setupe.exe and run a "Complete File Search" on the drive letter for the JPEG file types and the TIFF file type.

You should be able to click on the files found in the search results screen and preview the content - i.e. see the pictures.

Please let me know how this goes.

Thank you.