Here is my situation. I was surfing the web on my two year old Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop with Windows Vista when the computer froze and locked up. I could not click on anything or do anything. I restarted the computer. As it restarted the Windows Startup Repair window came up. It scanned my computer and found errors that it could not fix automatically. It told me that there was no operating system installed. I went online and troubleshot the computer as best as I could. I did not want to lose the information on my hard drive so I went out and bought a new one and installed Windows Vista on it. After two months, no problems. I ordered a case and USB connector for the old hard drive. When I plugged it in to the computer and looked inside the files I was stunned. All the files under my username were gone. Windows said the folder was empty. How could this be? I found data recovery software that scanned my old hard drive and was able to recover all my files. The files were only lost; they were sitting on the hard drive but could not be accessed except after the data recovery software did its job. I have been trolling the web looking for answers. Can anyone explain why or how this could have happened? What can be done to prevent this from happening again?
Tagged with: data recovery software • dell inspiron • hard drive • job • laptop • operating system • windows startup
Filed under: Windows Repair Software
I don’t know why that happened but it could easily be avoided by using the "Complete PC Backup" program that comes with Vista.
I had startup errors that could not be repaired Automatically and I restored the computer back to exactly like it was when I did the backup right down to every Desktop Icon and Wallpaper.
This has saved my computer 3 different times.
Windows is dependent upon the registry. You made a new registry when you installed the new OS. The data recovery program ignores this fact. To prevent this do backups often or just switch to Linux