Windows 7 All my desktop data gone after lots of bleeping, please help me get it back!

[digiman2372]

Hello everyone, several months ago my laptop started making bleeping noises as I booted it up. sometimes it would even boot up very slowly. After a couple of weeks of this bleeping, a found that all my data on the desktop was gone after I logged into my user account. and the background picture was changed too. is there any way I can get ti back? I tried doing a system restore for the user account but no luck. maybe I should try it for the whole computer? I just dont want to mess anything up, please help! I had so much valuable information that I need!

 

[Neemobeer]

Open a command prompt and just type set
Look for USERPROFILE= if you see something like C:\Users\TEMP... or at least the work temp in it then Windows had an issue loading your profile and created a temp profile. Your data should be intact. Let us know if this is what you see

 

[digiman2372]

sorry for the late response. There is indeed a temp file. Howerver when i look in the original user account, the files are still missing. If I remember right It logged me in with my normal account with missing files before it started logging me in with the temp account. any suggestions.

 

[digiman2372]

anybody there? here is the link to see my laptop specs. link http://speccy.piriform.com/results/EwSZx8c3zhhNMqIOWLoE6Kb


someone else saw my speecy link and said my hardrive is failing. i don't think there is too much time left for me to figure this out.. if I dont get instructions soon, im just going to try the minitool data recovery program. also should i keep my laptop from updating? it wants to update but im afraid that might make things harder.

 

[Neemobeer]

If it's loading with a temp profile, just open the file explorer and go to C:\Users and you can just backup the correct user profile if the drive is starting to fail.

 

[Neemobeer]

The SMART test shows warn, but none of the tests are showing any major problems I don't think your drive is failing, it just has some minor errors which isn't that uncommon with a drive thats been in use for years.

You are running a computer that's Windows 7 and your AV is disabled which is a really bad idea if that machine is on the internet as Windows 7 isn't supported anymore and there are already quite a few known and active exploits. I wouldn't be surprised if the system was infected with malware.

 

[digiman2372]

neemobeer, It is not a temp file. I already copied all the content I could from the original user profile to the new one. despite that, the content is still missing. It has to be somewhere. I already checked all the user folders, including the temp ones, and its not there. what should i do? also I dont use this laptop for the internet, only personal work so I should be ok.

 

[digiman2372]

I think I almost got it!! someone please respond!!! I downloaded clonezilla and it looks like I successsfully managed to copy the disk image. her is a screenshot, can anyone tell me if im ready to use a program like minitool now?? i think im so close! (im sorry, I dont know why the picture is upside down, i tried rotating it but it keeps uploading like that)

 

[Neemobeer]

Have you tried using a recovery tool like testdisk, ntfsgetdataback or recurva to try and recover the data?

 

[digiman2372]

not yet, i'm dciding which one will be best to use for this precious data. do you think those programs you suggested compare to minitool or photoRec?

 

[Neemobeer]

photoRec is made by the same people as testdisk. Which ever tool you use you will need to recover the data to a drive other than the one you recover from otherwise you can override the data you're trying to recover.

 

[digiman2372]

understood, thank you so much for your reply neemobeer! I will let you know what happens. in gonna to be pretty busy today and tomorrow, so it will be a couple of days. I need to make sure I can sit down a dedicate a whole day to this with no interruptions at all.

 

[Neemobeer]

Another trick you can try that I was reading about, is it's possible to pull files from a volume shadow copy if you have it enabled, which is should be by default.

Open an elevated command prompt and type
vssadmin list shadows if there are any shadow copies for your C drive you can mount them and see if you can extract your files from there.

 

[digiman2372]

sorry that i'm a bit computer illiterate, but how do I access the command prompt? is it straight from the windows tool bar? or do I have to download anything?

 

[Neemobeer]

Click on Start type 'Command Prompt'

 

[janerampl]

If you watched beeping noises when you turned on your laptop, then there is definitely a problem with the hard drive, and because of this, your data was lost. Most likely, they were deleted due to improper operation of the hard drive. You need to contact specialists as soon as possible. I recently recovered photos from my SD card, and I couldn't do anything myself. My friends advised me to contact the guys who make SD CARD RECOVERY. Perhaps they also work with hard drives. You can write to them and tell them about your problem, but given my experience, you need to act faster; otherwise, more and more files will be deleted.

 

[Callistemon]

The HDD is certainly defective as it has 1,248 reallocated sectors, which is well beyond any tolerable quantity of minor errors. The firmware defined thresholds for SMART attributes are absurdly lax and do not fail until the last 24 hours. The "Warning" status is from third party software being more reasonable than the firmware in determining thresholds for attributes, and does not mean the HDD is not defective yet.

The binary data was already backed up with ddrescue and was 100% successful, so as long as the backup is confirmed to contain the correct data, expensive data recovery labs are not required.