ok so while i was having a GREAT time camping and wheelin this weekend, my fraternity threw a party... someone during the party broke into my room, and allowed people to spend the ngiht, How kind of them... so besides SLEEPING IN MY BED, they messed with my computer, i come home to find BattleField 1942 in the cd drive, DVDx installed, but more importantly ALL the files on my desktop deleted. a bunch of my pictures, my homework, my resume (which needs to be submitted tomorrow) EVERYHTING gone. they did however leave me my FF icon and My computer and Recycle bin icons. i've done system restore, which broght back someof the folders on the desktop, but none of the files, i am trying a program right now called GetDataBack. any suggestions on how to get the info back... i am SO pissed right now.

 

anyone?! help me!!!1 i am starting to freak out. i ran GetDataBack and it still couldnt find my resume. help me!

 

bump for ya

 

:bounce2:

good luck chris

 

Pick up this months Maximum PC magazine.
It tells you how to do this, and there are some free and $$$ apps to do this.
It is the February isse you want, on page 49.

Sorry to hear of this.
Words can not describe what I would do if somewone did this to me.

 

had to do this not long ago on a drive I had formatted. Tried a handful of programs off downloads.com - they all had crappy restrictions for their trial versions, but I finally found one that got me what I needed. Unfortunately, I don't remember which ones were decent.

Ummm, is it possible that your hard drive was pretty full & they deleted a bunch of stuff to make room for the games they installed? If so you might be in bad shape. Deleted files are only possible to recover until something else is written to those sectors on the hard drive. Once new data is written there they are gone for good.

Other thought, maybe they were joking around & hid them? Try a find for all files named *.jpg & see if they just moved all your files to some folder.

 

I hope that's the case also. I would do a search too. Here's a couple of common extensions:

• *.doc - MS Word
• *.jpg - Pic file
• *.bmp - Pic file
• *.pps - PowerPoint file

Good luck man. This crap is why I don't like fraternities. I'd be after somebody's ass for sure.

 

Ever thought about PASSWORD protecting your PC ???

Have you heard about BACKUPS ? He have nifty little things like CD-RW, Zip Drives, USB Drives, Floppy disks, and DVD-R(*) to name a few.


I have a disaster recovery program at home, It scans the drive sector by sector and brings back any data it can, Only problem is it requires a second hard drive of equal or greater size to copy the recovered data too. than you have to sift threw all the data and try and find what your looking for.

Let me know.

 

Good point Michael.
Chris, I backup every week to an external 200 GB Seagate USB drive.

The software does it every Sunday at 4:15 PM.
You really should invest in something like this.

Good to have in case a virus takes you down too.
Been there done that, and recoverd.

You can hide the USB drive when you are gone, or lock it up somewhere in case anyone breaks into your room again.

I would call the police though and let them know what happened here.
Breaking and entering, even in a dorm would be a crime I would imagine.

 

corey has a good point, buti doubt that he would want to get his "brothers" charged.

I would flip out if someone broke into my room, slept in my bed and messed with my stuff.

P.S. WASH EVERYTHING!!

 

might i suggest a pasword protected screensaver in the future.

If the data was deleted to make room for a huge game or something, then your likely out of luck as there is a good chance the disk space was overwriten with the new game.

 

just walk around and pour coffee into everyone else's laptop/computers ... then everyone will be pissed and then everyone will get together and make up some rules about not messing with other people's things. Until then, everyone is just going to laugh at you, cause it's funny as long as it's not you.

 

P.P.S. And burn some of it too.

 

 

thanks for in input guys. i ran GetDataBack, and now Active@Undelete. yes i already searched for the files in other locations. there really isnt THAT much stuff on this computer. i have a 200 and 80 gig external hooked up to a computer acting as a file server, so i can access the data wirelessly through out the house as well as when i am in the lab since i know the internal IP address. so the only thing thats stays on this computer is frequently accessed files and "new" stuff that havent copied over. this leaves PLENTY of room on the hard drive to install anything.. (28G free of the 40G HD) i talked to all the guys in the house and they all have said that it wasnt any of them, and that there were random people in my room who told them i said it was ok... which is not the case. i called up and started screaming at the girl who i dont even know but slept in my bed, and alsmost had her crying by the time i was done (some times if feels so good to be a raging asshole with hemroids) but she claimed she was never on the computer since "she had no reason to be on the comptuer" , to which i responded YOU HAD NO REASON TO BE IN MY ROOM! i still have a couple people to hunt down and kill, err i mean talk to to find out why the hell they were in my room. as for password protect on screen saver, i find it annoying to have to enter my password everytime i sit down at the computer, and since i live in the room by myself 99.999 % of the time its not an issue.

 

Actually she did have a reason for being in there.

 

P.S. isnt it easy to make a resume? Ive made mine from scratch 10000 times

 

ya its just annoying i have to...

 

All the suggestions people have given you are valid and good, but the only way to get back the maximum number of files back is to bring it to a specialist who uses a special tool to put the hard drive in and recover the files. While I don't know how it works, because I never had the need to find out, I do know it works really well in most cases, because even if a sector has been overwritten, it takes 7 times of overwriting for pre-existing data to disappear.

So sorry to hear about this Chris, no one deserves to have this done to them and no matter how "good" those friends were, they are no friends at all unless they completely take the blame and don't get pissed at you. I know it's hard sometimes, but they are not worth it. Again, this differs for every person, but in general that's the idea.

Oh yeah, and invest in a backup too

 

1. password protect EACH account on windows XP/2k.

2. never give anyone your passwords.

3. even if you are the only person to use that machine, unless it is locked in a secured room, never EVER assume it is safe.

4. heck, even all my personal and work machines have a password and uses strict password rules.

5. if you leave your machine on 24/7, LOCK the screen. dont depends on windows screensaver password. use the windows LOCK TERMINAL procedure. that way, if people get a remote connection to it, they still have your windows password to get around.

6. want a cheap backup? use google mail to email it to yourself. that way, you have access to it as long as you web access...