Help somehow my laptop memory is wiped! lost dd's new baby pics!

[yelnats]

Someone must know what I need to do! I attempted to log onto my laptop last week and it said something about restoring the system and returning to its factory settings - it wouldnt allow me to say no to it and it proceeded to clear the entire system and re do it. (sorry dont know the technical terms).

When it finished and let me log on all My Documents are gone! I have lost EVERYTHING!!

Someone out there must know what to do? I am about to start screaming as my babys baby pictures have disappeared!

Thanks in advance you wise old mumsnetters. xx

oh no - I really feel for you - this happened to me last year and for a few days thought we had lost several years of photos. Then dh had the bright idea of removing the hard drive and putting it in another computer - fortunately we have more than one, and lo and behold it worked. First thing I did was copy everything to another drive and then onto CDs. Not saying this will work for you but it's something to try. If all else fails contact a data recovery company - expensive, but worth it to get baby pics back.

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We dont have another computer at home but thanks for your advice.

dh says take it to a data recovery place like this Just googled it - we haven't used it ourselves - hopefully won't have cause to.

it's most probably expensive and they may not be able to retrieve everything

most importantly don't save anything else on the computer as writing new stuff may overwrite "deleted" files and can make them completely irretrievable

fingers crossed good luck

Thank you I will give them a call tomorrow.

There are programs like recovermyfiles which claim to perform "File recovery after accidental format, even if you have reinstalled Windows.", which is exactly what you need.

Ideally you (or a techie friend), would take the disk out of the PC and set the jumpers on the drive to read only, to minimise the risk of any recoverable data being overwritten. You would then either

a) install a new disk, or
b) plug your disk into a friends PC as a second disk

then run the trial version of recovermyfiles to see if can get the data back. If it can, then pay the $60 (£30) they want for the full version.

If not then send the disk off to a specialist to see what they can do.