All files vanished - Virus? XP Problem? PLEASE HELP!!!!!
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when my computer froze. The fan/other machine noises
ceased. The video at the top of the screen was screwed
up. Nothing on the computer (notebook) would work,
including the power button. I finally held down the power
button long enough to force a restart. XP ran scandisk
upon restarting; it took a long time.
When the usernames appeared on the screen, I clicked on
mine (which is also the administrator account) and was
shcoked to find that all of my settings were gone; XP
appeared as it did when I first installed it, with all of
the items I had stored on my desktop gone and the
taskbar, desktop, etc. restored to their original state.
I tried to open Outlook, but it responded as though it
had just been installed and had no accounts set up. I
looked in My Documents, which had hundreds of files in it
before the crash and there was NOTHING.
All my files are gone--they just disappeared. Pictures,
music, Office files, web site storage, everything is
gone. My husband and I have both searched for them every
way we know how. My applications are still available. "My
Recent Documents" shows files that I did read recently,
as do the "recent files" sections of Word, etc., but when
I try to open those files, I get this error message:
"Problem with Shortcut - The drive or network connection
that the shortcut "any file name.lnk" refers to is
unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted
or the network resource is available, and then try
again."
It's almost like my user account was deleted, except that
it wasn't because my name was on the login screen from
the first time I rebooted after the crash.
I cannot find any information about this problem. I would
be so grateful for your help. Obviously, there are years
and years' worth of files, family photos, email, etc.
stored on this machine, and it wuld break my heart to
loose all that; I also use this machine for business and
it would be a disaster to lose all of the business-
related information I've collected.
FYI, I've had XP installed since October 2002 and have
not had problems. Also, I do not know exactly how much
disk space I had prior to this crash, but it seems that
there is enough space taken up on my hard drive right now
that these files must be SOMEWHERE. A virus check turned
up nothing. Please let me know if I can provide further
info. Thank you!
All files vanished - Virus? XP Problem? PLEASE HELP!!!!!
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