[gt1]

Hi

All my data has been erased!...i cant find any of my music nor my pictures!!!!

Some one please help me

Iv norton checked it and it says i dont have any viruses! i have no idea waht to do!

Thanks peeps

[PhilE]

OK - give us a bit more background...

Mac or PC?
Were the files on an external drive or internal?
Have only those specific folders disappeared or an entire drive letter?
When did you last see them? What have you installed or run on your PC since then?

[discobay]

If you are on a pc running Windows XP press the Windows key (bottom left between the Ctrl and Alt keys) and F together. That will bring up the Find window. Click on "All files and folders" and type in part of a picture or music file that you think you've lost then click Search.

[JohanSWE]

If it's a serious case so that the disk has been damaged, ie bad sectors, cluster damage and such, you should try "dead disk doctor" its free to dload and can work magic on anything from damaged cd/dvd's to crashed Hard drives, usb memory sticks and so on.
It helped me more than once.

Good luck
/J

[KnowItAll]

If you need a real professional service ..

http://www.intellirecovery.com.hk/en_index.html

Not cheap if you've physically wrecked your drive (in our case .. in fell and bounced a couple of times... ) ended up spending like US$ 2K for a clean room recovery.

[connecta]

gt1, if you can check your harddisk with norton and can access it otherwise, then it is not about bad sectors etc. instead, it rather looks like that your stuff has been somehow deleted.

however, deleting under windows just means that your file-system has erased the log of it, but the files have usually not been really deleted/overwritten yet. just imagine it like having a book, but a few pages of the index have been wiped out. but as it is only the index, it doesn't mean that the content it is referring to, has been wiped out either. so the index shows that the deleted parts are 'free' and the next time data is saved, it will use that space. therefore:

1. DO NOT WRITE ON YOUR HARDDISK, or at least try to minimize write access. read acces is no problem though.

2. try to get some recovery software, specialized on rescuing deleted data, which are not overwritten yet. i can recommend r-studio. to determine which version is right for you, you will need to right-click on your drive and check the "file system" in "properties" of the context menu.

don't expect it to be a quick recovery (it might take hours) and maybe a lot data is permanently lost already. but it might help you to at least recover some data, especially as pictures are only small files. KiA's suggestion with the recovery company works for the very serious cases, but for music and pictures it's most probably not worth it.

for the next time: backups are always good. but most important: have two drives or at least split up your drive into at least two partitions - one for the system and one for the data. makes recovery much easier and faster, as the system partition can do whatever it wants without overwriting data on the data partition.