My documents have disappeared.

[Jimmill]

Old Hard Drive had bad bootsectors. tried rewriting the MBR which didn't seem to help with getting past the dma pool chek on bootup. I was advised that a reinstall of Win XP would not take away personal folders. This was true apart from my sons user area. Sometime he had changed his user name and this renamed his personal folders within the my documents fiolder (so he tells me). all other users are still there. His outer folder is still there, all his favorites are there, his recent doc links are all there but his documents have evaporated. Any idea about refinding them?


Here's hoping, Jim m.

 

[vivid_vibe]

If he remembers any filenames, even partials, you could do a search and see if the folder was relocated somehow.

 

[xtweaker]

I'm afraid I have bad news... They are gone. The My Documents folder has been overwritten. You son's profile was probably the first administrator created on the system, therefore the SID was the administrator's, and his folder has been overwritten.

That happened to me a long time ago... and I learned the hard way.

To avoid this, you should create another partition and keep the smaller one only for the OS.

On the other, the biggest, put a copy of the i386 folder from the Windows XP cd, and create documents folders for each user, then point their My Documents folder to it (right-click, properties on My Documents from the desktop, then change the path). Save any important file or program installation to that partition.

That way, if you ever have to format the drive, you can format only the first partition, reinstall the OS and still have your files on the other partition.