Lost Files after Win7 Upgrade

Howdy All

I have just done the upgrade from Win7RC to Win7 Professional.

My laptop has two internal hard drives - C where the operating system and software is, and a larger D (500GB) where all my data is.

The installation onto C went fine. After re-start, I am, horrified to find that all the FILES in my folder tree in and under d:\My Documents are missing. In My Computer, the Drive shows as 65GB free on 465GB which means the files are probably still there. They're not hidden, I show hidden files and created a hidden file just to be sure. I tried taking ownership of one of the sub folders (don't want to make wholesale changes to the entire MyDocs folder in case I destroy an recoverability. No change.

To clarify - I can navigate my way through the entire folder tree - there are just no files in there anywhere apart from the odd ini file (such as picasa.ini)

There is only one account on the laptop, it's an Administrator account. There are other folders on the D drive - the contents of those folders are visible and accessible.

The only difference I can think of with the d:\My Documents folder is that it was part of the "Documents" library.

Help!

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

Regards, Ken

Download an Ubuntu live cd and use it to see if your data can be salvaged, then clean install 7. Upgrades are useless and cause strange issues.

My machine doesn't have a CD drive at all. It's a laptop with two internal drives.

If your machine has a DVD drive it will work too.

Sorry - No optical drive at all. Just two internal hard drives.

The problem is not hidden files. I always show hidden files. To be sure I created a text file in Mydocs and then marked it as hidden - it shows.

Thanks for the replies by the way.

KenPascoe said:

Sorry - No optical drive at all. Just two internal hard drives.

The problem is not hidden files. I always show hidden files. To be sure I created a text file in Mydocs and then marked it as hidden - it shows.

Thanks for the replies by the way.

Try the permissions advice. If that fails you can try Ubuntu via USB - is that how you installed 7?

Hi Barman58

I tried your suggestion on a folder in the tree:
(a) because it's only folders/files in and under d:\my documents that are affected;
(b) I don't want to make wholesale changes until I have something I think is going to work.

So I did it on d:\my documents\V Australia\ correspondence (which has several files and folders in it).

Right Click, Properties, Security, Advanced, Owner, Edit, Selected My Username, Ticked "Replace Owner on sub containers and objects", Ok, Warning Message - Ok, Ok, Ok, Right click on Folder, properties, security, looking at permissions - I have everything from Full Control through to Write (but not Special Permission).

Also - there are three "Account Unknown" entries in the Group or usernames box that I haven't seen before.

This hasn't fixed anything unfortunately - I can click into Correspondence, see the folders in it, click into those folders, create files in the folders and delete them, etc.

Again, thanks for the reply - any other suggestions?


Do you believe I should attempt what you've suggested on the whole drive? I have two potential last ditch recoveries:

- I made an Acronis Tru-Image of the C drive before the upgrade - I could restore that back to Win7RC and hope the files are accessible;
- I could remove the drive and attached it externally to another machine. Removal is a pain, last time it was done the motherboard ended up fried (it was done by a HP technician, would you believe?)

As such modifying the permissions of the whole drive (or just the MyDOcs folder, which is the only folder tree affected by this problem) worries me in that it might compromise my last ditch recovery options - horrible as they are ...

Ken