Please help, my pictures vanished after unintentional restart

Hi guys!

i beg for help to solve this problem.

i have had an evil past days all full of computer problems since ISP technician that erase 200 tabs in mozilla with sensitive info to data loss due unintentional power off and unsaved notepads.

that by the way trying to avoid again or to reduce the loss for the next time i was installing a screen capture program (a soft tat take a screen-shots in time intervals so i could at least remember what i had open, but when trying some software's i decide to uninstall the av because it was giving me problems i uninstall it and then it ask me for restart i choose not now, i left the computer for a while and when i came back i found it OFF (i imagine the restart message of the antivirus had a countdown otherwise what else could have turned of the computer), and it was not a power interruption, and when i start it again i found a black wallpaper and i decide to go to my picture to select the wallpaper again i found that my picures has vanished.

thes days have been problem by problems everywhere, could you please guys help me,

i am using linux now i want to leave the windows partition alone to see what can i do to get the pictures back, i was looking for a data recovery software like "getdataback" but it doesn't exist for linux, please help!

Testdisk and photorec work under Linux:

CGSecurity

Be sure to read the tutorials if you've never used it before...

that soft works partially but all the pictures i was looking for had now different names and just some of them

but the WORSE part is that right now i have discovered that not just the wallpaper pictures are missing, 90% of all my pictures!

please what can it be done?

Did you try testdisk first?

It only recovered 10%?

The random names comes from the fact that it found the files themselves, but the area of the disk that stores your filenames was overwritten, or cannot physically be read.

Is the drive in good shape?

kharl said:

that soft works partially but all the pictures i was looking for had now different names and just some of them

but the WORSE part is that right now i have discovered that not just the wallpaper pictures are missing, 90% of all my pictures!

please what can it be done?

There is a program called Recuva.
It can be found at Cnet.
It is free.

(.. it is near impossible to to truly delete a file from your computer. )

Also, if you were to run a program called Snitch Plus ( I think it is a paid program) ,
it will find everything on your computer !

Did you receive a pop-up warning that your computer was infected and other Hard Disk warning scares, wanting you to buy an anti-virus to combat this, but which is actually a fake AV trojan or rootkit infection which hides your files?

Otherwise it isn't really possible that 90% of your pictures could just vanish unless they had not been saved in the first place. You described a very incompetent scenario there with screenshot programs being used to save files you'd not saved yet, not at all acceptable practices in Win7. Your downloaded files should be saved, period.

I would run a full scan with Malwarebytes in Safe mode and post back if you have the fake AV infection so we can help you fight it with the necessary tools.

Otherwise use Recuva as recommended to recover what you can, then use competent practices of saving your files when you download them, and a dependable AV like Microsoft Security Essentials with the Win7 Firewall kept up to date.

As you're unwilling to boot off of the Windows partition, you could create a boot CD/DVD/USB, add Recuva to it, and boot from it. That would ensure that the Windows partition remains "untouched".