How do I recover files on hard drive from crashed motherboard?
Nick asked:
My motherboard recently crashed and I replaced everything in the system. I reinstalled XP onto a new hard drive and hooked up old HD as a slave. When I open that HD some of my files are there, but not all of them. Particularly, things that were saved to the desktop. Is there any way to recover these missing files? They were mainly family pics, jpgs.
Website content
My motherboard recently crashed and I replaced everything in the system. I reinstalled XP onto a new hard drive and hooked up old HD as a slave. When I open that HD some of my files are there, but not all of them. Particularly, things that were saved to the desktop. Is there any way to recover these missing files? They were mainly family pics, jpgs.
Website content
Tags: Missing Files, Motherboard, New Hard Drive
November 19th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
yes,but is expensive ,data recovery is not cheap .
November 21st, 2008 at 3:02 am
wow if you can recover those i’d be a life saver…buit extremely difficult.piriform the makers of ccleaner came out with a program for people in your situation.try it out!ive used it and it does recover files like it says.but for you its gonna be hard because you had a Mobo crash…althought you can still hope that they’re there.try out the program
November 22nd, 2008 at 5:15 am
On your old drive you need to look for the following folder
Documents and Settings\username\desktop
the username bit will be unique to you personaly (your name or handle)
November 25th, 2008 at 6:52 am
I’m presuming that Windows XP was on the old hard drive, but you will find your desktop from your previous installation under C:\Documents and Settings\\Desktop\
Where is, replace with whatever your user account was called, if you do not know what your account was called, in all probability it was named User or similar.
You may find that Windows says “Access denied” when you try and access these folders. You will need to “take ownership” of the files within that folder. You can find this option in the folder properties.
November 25th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
You could try switching the hard drive to master and boot to windows normally - you may get some hardware erorrs but thats no biggie, as long as your O/S files are not corrupted. Once you get to your desktop, back up whatever you need to your favorite flavor of storage (thumb drive, CD, floppy, etc…). Then switch back to slave and format your drive to use as aditional storage.
November 26th, 2008 at 12:09 pm
You can follow the hints from others — they are good suggestions — but the specifics vary with the OS you used and files may be tricky to find.
The simplest way would probably to use the search function and simply copy the files you want to a directory of your choice.
If you want to find all jpg files search on drive d: (or whatever the letter is for your (now) slave drive) for all files with the name “*.jpg” (don’t use the quotes) or, if you know they were all on the desktop, search for the folder called “desktop”. There may be more than one, but the one you want will be under your name or maybe administrator (depending what you set up on the old installation), but you can quickly look in each to find the files you want.
Once you know where the files are, open the folder and also open ‘my computer’ and drag and drop the files you want (select holding down the Ctrl key) from the folder in the search results window to the target folder in the ‘my computer’ window (or drop direct on the desktop once again).
November 27th, 2008 at 11:31 pm
Try following this: