[odirish]

On Sept. 6th i was using the computer. It worked fine. I left the computer on but after 20 min. the screen goes dark. My husband (thinking that the computer was off), pushed the start button. After realizing that he had just shut down the computer, he again hit the start button. He tells me that when it started up all I had was a black screen with a recycle icon on it. I had nothing . I reinstalled windows and called comcast to get my internet back. I tried a systems restore to take me past Sept. 6th, but no matter what date I manually put in, I am not able to restore past Sept. 6th. Is there anything I can do to get my documents, pictures etc. back or are they gone for good? Thanks for any help.

Mary Ann

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if you reformatted your computer theres nothing you can do as far as i know unless you reformatted on a separate partition maybe there is a way to get some things back.

[Gabriel1]

if you reformatted your computer theres nothing you can do as far as i know unless you reformatted on a separate partition maybe there is a way to get some things back.

[Ztruker]

Did you format (Clean Install) or did you do a parallel install which would leave a C:\Windows.old folder? If the latter then you can access all you documents, pictures, music, etc via C:\Windows.old\Users\<youraccountname>.

[odirish]

I'm not sure. When I saw that all I had was a black screen, I took the windows vista disc and put it into the tray.
I tried doing systems restore but nothing. I do remember while doing a virus scan that I saw things like old windows (if
that helps)

Mary Ann

[Stoxguy]

Well, Mary Ann, that all depends. Most installs overwrite the entire disc. You can go into the control panel and check to see if the disc is partitioned with anything from your previous install. I doubt it did, as you did what is called a clean install and the disc gets wiped, sorry about that. When you did the install, did you see the message from the Microsoft CD, that ALL your previous information was going to be over written and won't be saved. I did this once, way back with Win98, which would give me the BSOD on a daily basis. I'll never do that again, lost everything. My old IBM laptop caught on fire. It was like a scene from Mission Impossible, this computer will self-destruct, which it did. Took me 4 years to finally recover some data off the hard drive. A professional hard drive recovery person did it.

[Ztruker]

Open Computer, expand the C: drive. Look for a Windows.old folder. If it's there then your data is there as I mentioned before.