Windows 7: Noob user claims Windows7 asked him to reformat at boot

We have a noob user in the office who was recently given a new Windows 7 laptop. He claims today that on the weekend when he booted his laptop a screen came up "with some stuff" and asked if he wanted to reformat. As noobs will do, he clicked yes and as he said "before I knew it, it was formatting my hard drive, and now all my programs and files are gone."

This guy was given an external HDD so he could do daily backups, but of course he was apparently only backing up "occasionally" and as a result now does not have some files he needs for a presentation.

So, two questions:

1. Other than a virus or malware, does anyone know why he would be presented with this option at startup? Is it possible he hit one of the F keys and booted into a recovery mode by accident?

2. Is there anyway to recover the files from the formatted disc or is he SOL?

It's possible - depends what recovery options the oem put on there.

You should be able to get some back - as long as they haven't been overwritten .

The Free Recuva (they do a portable version you can run off a flash - or run it from an external machine to avoid writing anything else to the HD ) is worth a try.

It has a deep scan mode for formatted drives.

Pandora is also a decent freebie - good for certain types of iles - see screenie in link below.

Paid apps. might be beter still. Easeus Data Recovery Wizard is also worth a go.



Recover Files After Format

Thanks, for the info. One of the other techs here ran Recuva. Apparently he wasn't able to get much.

It turns out this is a Lenovo laptop, and the user says he pressed the ThinkVantage button, and that's how he got there?

Oh well, there's only so much you can do when users insist on just pressig and clicking things without understanding them.