[homebody]

In short the kids messed up the computer resulting in the operating system could not be found. I took the tower to my ever faithful computer guy and he ran a recovery program on the hard drive. It seems he was able to recover files but the extensions were missing. He saved the recovery files on to the existing drive and installed a new drive in my tower. He is also going to install the old drive with the files as a D drive so I can access the information and try and find out where they go. I am a novice at this. It seems to me to be quite an undertaking. The files I am most interested in are those saved in "My Documents" all other programs I seem to have disc's for and can just reload them onto the new hd. My question is this, are there any programs out there that could recoginize these files and put them where they belong? Or if not how do I go through these files and do this by myself?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Edited by homebody, 24 June 2005 - 06:46 AM.

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hello...

you didn't tell us what operating system you are running?
have you installed a fresh copy of the operating system already on your new drive? your files can be easily copied over after that.

you will find them in:

<drive letter>:\documents and settings\<your username>\My Documents

<drive letter> - is the driver where all your data is stored (e.g. D drive)

you just have to select all the contents of My Documents, right click and select copy, then go to your new My Documents and right click to paste them in, replace all files.

let me know if that makes sense and i can explain or clarify.

There isn't a specific program that does that for you, its an easy process. you just need to know where your files are.

[samiko]

hello...

you didn't tell us what operating system you are running?
have you installed a fresh copy of the operating system already on your new drive? your files can be easily copied over after that.

you will find them in:

<drive letter>:\documents and settings\<your username>\My Documents

<drive letter> - is the driver where all your data is stored (e.g. D drive)

you just have to select all the contents of My Documents, right click and select copy, then go to your new My Documents and right click to paste them in, replace all files.

let me know if that makes sense and i can explain or clarify.

There isn't a specific program that does that for you, its an easy process. you just need to know where your files are.

[homebody]

I am using Windows xp. The files on copied on the recovery (old Drive) under either .doc files or xls files I guess there is a listing of over 400,000 files on this drive under different categories I've only listed two of them above. And he told me I have to open up each file separately view it for language I may understand and them save it to the location on the new hd.
Is this process correct? If so any insight on this process. As for finding the files that were important to me as those in "My documents" they are not located in my part of the recovery only listed under the type of file they were. So any insight to this process is appreciated.
Thanks so much

[samiko]

The best way is to recover all personal document into the new location, you don't need to open every file. highlight them all and copy them into the new location.

if you were only saving into My Document then copy the entire contents of the old "My Documents" into its new location and don't worry about picking each file seperatly.

hope the above helps.

[Johanna]

I guess I'm curious as to what good a "recovery" program is that loses file associations (extensions)?? Are you sure you understood him correctly that each individual file needs to be added to the new hard drive separately? Control a (select all) right click, select "Move to folder" should be enough, but the lack of extensions has me a bit concerned. Is this guy a professional? I don't have 400,000 files on my comp, but the idea of renaming or associating what i do have, one at a time, is daunting. I hope you post back any clarification he gives you, for future reference for the rest of us. Best of luck.

Johanna

[samiko]

When you try and double-click on one of your recovered files, does it open in the appropriate program? for exampe if you try and open an MS Word file which you have recovered does it open with MS Word? or does it ask you for what program you want to open it with?

file associations can be lost if the recovered versions aren't in the correct format, hence recovered with no file association.

when you view your files, do you see the icon for the associated program?