rickfarang Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 A friend unplugged the power while her Windows XP computer was running, without shutting down the OS first. The next day, when she turn the computer on, it came up with an old desktop, and most of what she had done since buying the computer had disappeared. This included her connection files for the internet, contact information, and lots of photographs. She wants to know how to recover the information that disappeared. I don't know much about Windows, and we will appreciate any help that you can provide. Thank you in advance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 rick, this sounds real strange. It's more like XP reported some problems at the next boot. Usually no problem unless the hard drive was damadged or important windows files were corrupted by the sudden power off. And then your friend did something disastrous: your friend choose to recover XP, either from CD or recovery partition. Just guessing here. Your friends computer came with preinstalled XP and instead of a full XP setup CD it came with either recovery CD or the recovery files were on a hidden partition on the hard drive. Right? I know from experience that computer users 'forgot' what they tried already, or fail to tell the the people they finally ask to help. If she doesn't have a backup of the important data (or complete system) she's fucked. I may be completely wrong of course... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rickfarang Posted July 20, 2008 Author Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 Well, that was my first thought as well. Or that for some strange reason, XP decided to revert to a saved state all of its own volition. I just received a telephone call, and she said that a friend came over and solved the problem, and everything is back to normal. She doesn't know what the guy did, but she is very happy that her problem is solved. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
carlton68 Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 Always better to have access to the computer than just guessing. Tell her to do backups. After an event like this she might see the advantage. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chelseafan Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 Theres always system restore if things go pear-shaped AFAIK you dont lose data files....might be wrong as I only had to do it once. I always save my files to a external hard disk with peroidic updates to a secondary bigger (1TB) external. That lesson came from college where I lost most of my corsework when the whole systems crashed Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shygye Posted July 20, 2008 Report Share Posted July 20, 2008 It probably booted up in Safe Mode or the clock got set to the year 2000. The file system can do funky stuff when the time stamp appears to be in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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