Windows 7: Upgrade from Vista to Win7 all Public Pictures folders now empty

I upgraded my system from Vista Home Premium to Win 7 Ultimate 32 two days ago. I used the default options to maintain all my documents and installed programs. Everything worked fine except that all the sub-folders in Public Pictures are now empty. There are 160 sub folders and there should be approx 6000 picture files in them.

The only thing that I think might be unusual about my pre-upgrade configuration is that I had my public folders located on a 2nd hard drive, F: instead of C:

As far as I can tell, all other data including that stored on the second drive survived the upgrade.

I downloaded Recuva and the first pass could not find the missing files. It is now performing a "deep scan" which is estimated to take 2 hours.

Any suggestions on where I might find the missing files?

Upgrade doesn't delete files AFAIK. If you can remember some file names from your public pic folder, you can try the search function in Windows 7.

This is why it's a good idea to do full backup before upgrading your OS. But what's done is done.

Yeah, I just recently sent my XP into Windows 7. Same problem. I used the 'Upgrade Windows' option, but still cleared data. I think it's worth it, but tell me if you get any solution to recovering the data.

I would plug the data HD into another computer to see if the data is read.

This is a good reason to unplug any other HD's during Windows 7 install, upgrade or repairs - although the installer should not touch data on another drive.

It may have something to do with the User account. Did it transfer other Public folder data?

Blockland, you cannot in-place Upgrade from XP to Windows 7 so any data on the target partition would be overwritten anyway. Look for a Windows.old folder which may have your files backed up in it.

I tried searching for a known filename from those that were missing. Nothing was found.

It did successfully transfer all other user account data as far as I can see (My documents, Public Movies etc"
I also did not see Windows.old anywhere obvious - I guess I should search for this also.

Luckily I had a fairly recent back-up on an external hard drive, so not too much was permanently lost. Annoying though....

i upgraded from vista to win 7 x64 and my windows old is located in at c:\windows old