I have tried going through CMD as admin. Without success.
Here are three captures of where I am trying to go through on the now "J:" drive. The middle pic is with Show Hidden files turned off. No documents show in that pic.
Your third diagram shows that you are trying to use that My documents redirection point. Doing so will not work.
Your third diagram also shows that there is no Documents folder. It has been relocated elsewhere on the computer or possibly to OneDrive.
Have you checked his OneDrive?
What other user folders are shown in J:\Users?
Denis
One Drive is empty.
Public
When he saves from an old version of Word it saves in Public documents. But it is not there either.
I have opened and searched through all the Users shown in the pic.
Really beginning to think they are gone.
Do you know the name of any of the files used? or their typical name?
Something you can use to search the entire drive for names of that type or even just the extension?
If you do, then you can use e.g. a free 3rd party indexing tool such as
Everything (popular)
Ultrasearch
I use Locate32
Set that tool up to index the whole of the drive.. then you can search.
That means you don't have to guess where they may have been saved.
As for Onedrive- if Onedrive was in effect, you can log in to and look at his on line Onedrive account and see if they are there.
Well, I'm sorry to say that I agree with you.
You should be able to retrieve any that were on the old system images / backups you mentioned but that will be all.
People can mean several different things when they use the term "reset". Perhaps the files were wiped at that stage but I can't see how that can be the case since you were able to find some documents in the Public folder.
Denis
Which reset did you do?
Reset Windows 10
Unfortunate indeed if you had - no backup - and chose a form of reset that lost your father's data.
Of the two ideas I suggested the one about Onedrive might help if Onedrive was in use and the files were saved where Onedrive is in effect.
Thanks for you suggestions. I may take it to a pro and see if they can restore it. Or i could scan all his docs in. I have his from 2021 which he actually hasn't added to that I know of. Give me something to do!
If he has a Onedrive account, then log in to it and have a look.
Without knowing which reset you did, can comment no further on the disk.
As a general comment, whatever files remain- if any- might be retrievable with a data recovery program.
Clearly a costly lesson has been learnt about the need for appropriate backups.
I am quite sure he does not have a One Drive as I am the one who set the system up.
I used the reset that would keep the files but the reset failed. Should have cloned it before doing the reset.
I ran a couple of recovery programs on it and did not find them.
Also used the search program suggested and no go.
Yes, I should have backed him up. Learning lessons is hard.
on the source or on the clone ?I ran a couple of recovery programs on it and did not find them.
is it an all sector clone ?
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