Help Needed Please

[Bluesteel705]

Hi, am relatively new to this forum but I do need some help.

My father is something of an amateur photographer has built up a collection of literally thousands of digital photos on his PC. Not being a techno whizz-kid he has never seen fit to back them up. Upon accessing his PC the other day all his photos appear to have dissapeared into the ether :eek: Now this is only his photos, and sounds a bit suspicious, but I do know that stuff isnt erased physicaly of the H/D its just treated as empty space, therefore I was wondering if anyone knew of any good file recovery software thats effective and not too difficult to use?

Mnay thanks in advance :ok:

Bluesteel

[IO540]

I am not up to date on recovery software, but the most important thing is that you do not perform any write operations to that hard drive.

Windoze does writing anyway and there isn't much you can do about that, but don't make it any worse.

Personally I have used a program called FinalRecovery, version 1.2, to unerase files from flash media (e.g. digital camera media) with great success. Most unerase programs do not work on removable flash media, accessed via USB-attached media readers. But I can't speak for FR on hard drives, especially with different types of partitions.

[jetcollie]

It's very unlikely he's deleted them permanently. The first obvious thing is to look in the recycle bin and see if the folder is there - if so, right click on it and select restore. The other possibilty is that it has somehow been saved as a subfolder of another existing folder. There are several ways to look for them - here's a relatively easy one! Select: Start/Run/ type 'explorer' in the box / OK. Now click on 'My Computer' then 'search' at the top and type in the name of one of his photos. Start the search and see if you can find it. If so, then under 'view' along the top select 'details' and note the full filename under the 'in folder' tab. Report back and I'll try to help restore them to where they should be!! Good luck.

[frostbite]

If you can't remember individual photo names type *.jpg into the search box and it will find all of that type on the HD.