Yesterday, Trend Micro told me that there was a virus with the svchost.exe process. Not knowing exactly what this process was for, I deleted it. Upon restarting the computer, the desktop appeared but nothing else, just a blank destop with no explorer and no apps. After consulting HP, I was left with nothing but to re-install XP using my recovery partition (D) drive. It told me that I would keep all of my documents and settings but lose all program files. When it finished, the computer worked fine. The applications and progam files were still on my computer, but I had lost all of my documents. (Exactly the opposite of the expected result)

I am wondering how to find any documents that may be left in some hidden folder in the D drive. Many forums online have similar questions and people seem to agree that these folders still exist, but may be hidden or in the partition drive itself. I don't know how to access this drive as it is locked by HP.

Please help. Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

This post has been edited by viruseslikeme: Jun 10 2008, 09:20 PM

Try searching on the file name of a document you know you had.

Previously, were all these documents stored in their owning program's default locations - usually under c:\My Documents?

A lot depends on which path you took during the HP recovery process. I think one way, which is default, is to do am install over the existing XP and leaves everything else intact. The other way is to do a clean install which formats the drive and if that is the path you took then your data may be gone forever.

If they still exist, they will be under C:\Documents and Settings\xxxxxxxx where xxxxxxxx is a folder associated with the account that was on your system before you used the XP recovery process.

To see what's there, you WILL probably need to show hidden and system files , so;

Open Control Panel then Folder Options and click on the View tab.
Select "Show hidden files and folders"
Uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types"
Uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (recommended)" (click Yes when prompted)

Now right click on My Computer and select Explore so you can see the drives and folders on the left and files on the right. Look through all the various levels in Documents and Settings, checking each My Documents folder for your missing documents.

If you know the name of one of the documents, you could use XP Search to look for it.That would get you to the right folder.

Unless the defaults were changed as suggested above.