okay my friend mark finally decided to upgrade to windows xp (from 98), he asked my advice and i told him to backup his my documents, which he did, but turns out he didnt need to as the upgrade didnt touch that, however now he has to reinstall all the software on his computer, its all in program files but not working as it should,

but the biggest problem he has is hes lost all his emails from all his clients, his address books and his settings, he doesnt remember his password, he never had to use it everything was already set up, all this was somewhere in c:\windows\application data\...... now when he upgraded there were some problems and it didnt work well, so we had to reinstall windows xp a second time, the c:\windows folder was deleted and reinstalled, so all the application data is gone, now i know that anything deleted from the hard drive can somehow be recovered unless the hard drive was formatted, i have no idea how this recovery works but i wanted to ask, does anyone know how to do something like this, or even if it is possible, and also is there some way we can recover all the settings?

ive asked him to leave the computer here overnight in the hopes ill be able to work something out so if anyone could give me some help i would really appreciate it.

Cheers,
ben

This post has been edited by BTPH: Feb 6 2006, 02:41 AM

okay i solved that problem by downloading a program called active undelete, which allowed me to find the old windows 98 installation,

so now that thats all said and done i would like to ask what other files i mgiht need to copy and to where in order to restore all (or atleast most) of hs original settings, i would also like to try and copy all the registry files and anything else to get all the old programs on his computer working again, without having to reinstall them

any help would be appreciated.

Cheers,
ben

I;m sorry...a little fuzzy here on where you currently stand with this PC....

you have your emails, or not?

The programs, I am afraid, will need to be reinstalled. It is just not as simple as adding files to the registry--furthermore, the win98 and xp registry are similar, but different enough so that attempting a merge like that could be deadly.

sorry gerry, i shouldve been more clear, when i found the old installation i found all the .dbx files and sorted everything out,

also, are you sure ther is nothing else i could do? ive heard of some programs used to save settings and transfer them to other computers but they are all xp to xp, wouldnt someone somewhere have been able to figure out 98 to xp?

thanks,
ben

it's not just settings, but files to...all of those initialization files and dynamic link libraries..it's a mess

A big drawback of windows is that it does not store all files it needs in the folder it is installed to, but drops files all over the place. And those files need to be registered.

You could maybe do it on a program by program basis, but no one can make a program account for every programs settings/files