Re: can my computer be fixed??
yes it did do a format of some sort.... it only took a minute or so on my SLOW computer so It had to be a quick format with minimal data damage. I have the equivalent of an external drive housing.... just a cable and power supply.
If I can get the majority I'll be thrilled...... How does this work? do the files and folders come back with their original names and extensions or do I have to directly address each and every file?
OK. Excellent questions....
I've been working in IT for just a shade over 20 years now, and I've recovered files from LOTS of drives. Just mention that so you know I'm not blowing smoke.
Getting your drive to just "come back the way it was" before the update hosed it "might be" possible, but it's really not a feasible option in your situation. That would be where you ship it off to a data recovery service and spend a couple grand for them to give it their "best effort". Nobody will give you a guarantee. If this computer had business records that were going to cost you a couple million if you couldn't get them back, I'd recommend giving that a shot, but for normal personal data, nah...
Basically after the program scans your drive it will present you with a list of files that it found. The list will be in a tree structure, pretty much as if you were using Windows Explorer. Then you just need to copy those files to another drive that is NOT the one you're recovering from. This can be the main hard drive in the computer your using to do the recovery, if it has room. If not, you'll need yet another external drive to plop them onto (this will be a handy drive to use for backups once your done with this recovery).
After you've got all the files you want to recover, just put the original drive back in your laptop and set things up again as if it was a new computer. It'll be a minor pain in the butt reinstalling all your software, but having a nice, fresh copy of Windows installed will be worth it. You should notice your computer running a bit smoother and faster once you finally come out the other end of this ordeal.
And then, of course, as an IT professional, it is my solemn duty to recommend that you look into backup solutions in the future. (But I'm sure you're probably already thinking along those lines...
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[Technical explanation: The files on your hard drive are not erased when the drive is formatted. What is erased is the "directory" that tells your computer where those files are located on the drive. The data is still there in perfect condition UNTIL some other program writes data onto that same location. The program I recommended, and the one that Bubba recommended, basically scan every last bit of the hard drive and can recognize a file even when the directory information is gone.
Why can't you get "all" of your data back? Because the system restore process saw the empty directory and thought it had a fresh, clean drive available. It definitely wrote data over top of some of the data that used to be there. Anything that got written over you're not going to get back. Anything that did not get written over, you should be able to recover. The good news is that the system restore didn't write much data back, and in practice it's quite likely that it only overwrote stuff that you don't care about anyway.
The spots on the drive that did get written over can also (maybe) be recovered, but that's where you run into spending lots of money. It requires equipment above and beyond just a second PC. And the companies that have that equipment will charge you big bucks to give it a try and offer no guarantees as to how much they'll recover.]
