WinMe to Win2000 upgrade crash. Is the data still there?

[man0fsteel]

More specifically, are my jpegs recoverable?

Details -

I was attempting to upgrage my Sony PC's OS from Me (which stunk from day one) to Win2000. Prior to this, I was dilligent and backed up all my files that were of importance (mostly jpegs of my little boy) to CD.

Then during the upgrade, something went haywire and the install failed. After a number of attempts to re-install Win2000 (never reformatted, just kept re-running the install disk), my PC barely boots up, with lots of "missing xyz.dll" file error messages. Needless to say, none of my old files show up when using explorer.

So I was about to format the drive and start all over from scratch, but when I tried to open the jpegs on my back up CDs on a different PC, all the jpegs wouldn't open! I couldn't even copy them from the CD to the hard drive. After some research, it appears the headers records are really screwed up on the jpegs (strangely, all the other files are fine) and there is other corruption as well, making recovery difficult, if not impossible.

So I'm wondering if the jpegs are still recoverable from my HD. I tried using a competitors product to no avail. It found thousand of jpeg files but none of them were viewable.

Any advise?

Thank you

[GDH]

Dont format the drive.

Please try this....

Download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com.

1. Install and run the program;
2. In the first Wizard window click on "Manually Set Options"
3. In the SEARCH tab take the tick out of "search for deleted files" so that there is only a tick in the box for "search for lost files".
4. In the ADVANCED tab put a tick in the box for "allow searching of physical drives".
5. Click OK and in the drive selection window select the physical drive - your booting drive is physical drive 0, your secondary drive should be physical drive
6. In the file type selection wizard window select the JPEG file types.

Now run this search. Let it run for at least a few hours. Whilst the search is in progress you can click on the files found and listed in the results window to diplay their content in the preview window.

This search will find JPEG files using their header and file structure. It will be interesting to see if the files are found, or whether there has actually been some change to the headers of these files. The files will not have their original names - they will be called "Recovered_Jpeg-1" etc.

Let me know the results of this search and we can see what can be done from here.

[man0fsteel]

[quote=GDH]Dont format the drive.

Please try this....

Download Recover My Files from www.recovermyfiles.com.

1. Install and run the program;
QUOTE]

Thanks for your assistance. My concern is I only have 1 physical HD on the PC in question. I do have a 40gb USB drive (it is not bootable tho') Can I install the software on it so I don't overwrite any disk space?

Thank you

[GDH]

Yes, you should be able to download and install directly to your USB.