A CMD Prompt Error Has Ravaged My System. Advice?

I finally finished selecting the files I wished to restore and when I hit the Recover -> Recover With Folder Structure button, absolutely nothing happens. There is no hd activity and no reaction by the program. It appears Puran doesn't work or has serious issues with my limited environment. Any chance you know of another Undelete utility that would work in this environment?

Alright, thank you very much for your help MilesAhead ^_^

The way an "undelete" program works has to do with the way files are deleted. When a file is deleted, the actual data comprising the file is not deleted. What is deleted is information pertaining to where data for that file is located on the disk, with this reference information deleted from the file system on the HDD the remaining actual data is flagged as "free space" so it can be overwritten with new data. An "undelete" program works by directly reading the data in spaces flagged as free and salvaging the orphaned files to be written out to a new location (preferably on a different storage media from the HDD being salvaged).

Of course, all of this means that there are some caveats when it comes to "undeleting" files that you need to understand:

• Keep any and all writes to the HDD to a bare minimum, ideally none at all. As mentioned, writing any new data to an HDD can result in data remaining in "free" space to be overwritten, which will make salvaging via undelete programs impossible.
• "Undeleting" as a concept was never actually intended, it's merely a side-effect of the way deletion of data is handled, so the entire process is dubious in its reliabilty. Even under ideal conditions it might not be able to recover some files.
• "Undeleting" is not the same as restoring data. Given that you are dealing with a damaged Windows installation, simply undeleting the required system files might not be adequate to restore the system to a working condition. I would strongly suggest a clean reinstall of the operating system after you have recovered any personal data you wish to save.

Whatever you decide on doing, good luck in fixing that system, and next time keep good backups and make absolutely sure you know exactly what you're doing in the command-line; do adequate research and don't just blindly follow tutorials.

A while back a rather old HD started throwing out corrupted sectors. So I moved all the data that I could salvage to existing drives. Since Windows had been up for three years with zero problems I decided I could do without the backups until I got a new drive. That drive never came.

I've ordered a new drive to ensure this doesn't happen again. Regular drive imaging will resume. I want to do a clean install but my biggest worry is backing up the existing configurations of several programs. Since I cannot run these programs I cannot gain visual access to their configurations, much less use the program to export its configuration.

I don't really need to restore Windows. I just need to figure out a way to save this data. Otherwise, it will add weeks onto the reinstallation process. This is the big bad I'm trying to overcome

That is an extremely helpful article. Thank you MilesAhead!

All right folks, I think I'm going to just bite the bullet and start working on the reinstallation. I sincerely appreciate the help you've given me. I feel much better about starting this process knowing I've tried all the options for resurrecting my system. You guys are awesome

MilesAhead I have had some luck. I received some advice from computergeekguy to try out another WinPE undelete solution and it worked. I copied the recovered files back over to my windows drive and am now in Safe Mode. I've run SFC with success! I have a few questions remaining about Windows but I'll put those in a new thread. Thank you again for all of your help. I made it!!