Help finding files please???

[Courageous]

Hi there.

I'm normally pretty reasonable with this sort of thing but this time I am foxed foxed foxed..........

My friend has a dell latitude, given to her as part of her redundancy package when eirjet when titsy. So, as such there may be some administrator restrictions set from many moons ago.

It has recently died on her (I spent 3 hours stripping and rebuilding it this morning to no avail) and I am now trying to recover her precious pictures and video. I thought this would be dead easy as I have an external hard drive adaptor. I have fitted the hard drive into the adaptor and my laptop now sees data in windows explorer.

This is where the problems begin:

I can find work related word docs by searching ".doc". When I search for any of the following I get results only of images from program packages and windows itself: .bmp - .jpg - .jpeg - .mpg - .mpeg - .mp4

She is concerned for the valuable pictures and video of course.

I have looked through all of the several "my pictures" folders and found only sample stuff.

Some of the folders on the root state that I do not have permission to access - access anyway. I do this and don't see much of value.

I have asked and both stills and video camera are sony. I have ascertained that she used to allow sony to do the downloading for her. I have no idea either where the program stores the pictures/videos when it does its business.

I have also searched for *.dsc as I think sony uses this as the prefix for images but I am not certain of that.

Does anyone have any idea how to proceed from here please? This would make her very happy indeed as all of the kids photos are there with (you guessed it) NO BL**DY BACKUP!!!!!

Thanx chaps.

[Neorion]

Hmm strange one that it is not showing you anything but the standard app images.

Only one partition right?

If your using xppro or similar change the drive permissions so you have full access rights.

the other long winded option is to check the file size of the folders you think it may be in.

You could also try installing an indexer like googles and let it index the drive contents?

you seem to have done everything else
____________________
VFR FI 2000- Shiney Red Thing
"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"

[Serendipity]

If it’s a corporate laptop then is it possible that her stuff is stored in offline files? If her My Documents folder had been redirected to the company server the IT guys would have set up an offline cache on the laptop for the times when it was off the network.

If you are viewing the hard drive from your laptop you may not see the actual files when searching because the caching system strips all the file extensions from them.

Try making sure that you can view hidden and protected system files (Open Windows Explorer > Tools > Folder Options > View). Then look for a folder on her hard drive under %systemroot%\csc (that would have originally been C:\WINDOWS\CSC but you probably see a different drive letter) CSC stands for Client Side Cache.

If she was using offline files you should see a bunch of folders called d1, d2, etc. These could be filled with randomly named system files called things like 0000003B, 00000095, etc with no file extensions. These are basically her files renamed and stripped of their extension. Try copying one onto your PC, add a likely file extension and see if it runs.

This will take you a looooooooong time. Especially if there are loads of files, but should get you loads of brownie points if you come up with the goods.

Could be barking up the wrong tree here, but worth a look.

Cheers
____________________
2007 CBF1000 & 2016 CBF1000F - Commuter heaven | 1994 CBR600FR - Awaiting defibrillation

[Courageous]

Thanx to both of you for your help - Serendipity, your comment about the cache rang a bell as I had seen a couple of oddly named folders something like d1,d2 etc but in this case it isn't where I found her data. I was playing with permissions and dismayed to see that despite setting them on the root of her drive and inc all folders and subs, each time I checked permissions on folders they had been excluded. In the end, through changing and changing and changing I found all the pics......

Many thanx guys - ya stars!

[Neorion]

Must have taken ages!

Next time properties>security>permissions>then hit the copy radio button and make the changes.

Do this on the root and it will filter down to every file.

At least you found them
____________________
VFR FI 2000- Shiney Red Thing
"some things man was never meant to know, for everything else there's Google"

[Courageous]

Copy button? Don't have one - this is vista and I have to say in many ways I preferred XP. Familiarity I suppose. Anyway, thanx again.

[GodzGift]

As long as there is no hardware failure, you can use this software to scan the HD and recover files.

I just uploaded it for you, the key is there as well. https://www.megaupload.com/?d=00VH1J7K

If that doesnt work you may have to give to those professional HD recovery places, I found place that will charge £30-50 for professional recovery.
____________________
Bike Level: Amateur | CBT Passed

[Deano]

hehe, to remove group policy from your PC at work on any Pc then delete the following registry contents in the regedit folders

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Policies

then run gpupdate /force in command prompt.

just remember peeps if you are tempted to nosy around in confidential documents at work, most administrators will audit unautorised access.

[Neorion]