Info appreciated

Hi there to anyone left over from the old sevenforums! Yeah, been awhile since I last logged into one of Brinks help forums.

Anyway....... have a few questions if anyone wants to take a stab at em. Last week my gaming laptop died. Pretty sure the cpu went down the toilet. It was 6 years old so wasn't entirely a surprise. Worst factory OC I'd ever seen, but I digress. It was a Win10 machine. THIS machine is many orders of magnitude better so win? lol Couple of questions...... at some point I refreshed my desktop and a folder I had there just.......... disappeared. Searched everywhere for it but nope. Tried searching with "Everything" even. Folder full of .jpgs. As far as I can see it just disappeared. Any clues? I've used system restore a few times now so mainly am just curious as to where it "went" Next, and my main questions I suppose. I'm getting ready to disassemble my old machine, how likely is it that the nvme M2 is still usable? It also has a spinner in it , how likely is it that I could USE that as an external?

Just an opinion, FWIW. A six-year-old M.2 NVMe is very dated technology, and a six-year-old spinner that was used for gaming is probably very tired, and shouldn't be counted on to do valuable things. I wouldn't re-use either of them, but that's just an opinion.

Pretty much what I was thinking tbh. THanks for your input

Wait for advice and don't do anything yet. My guess is the jpegs can be recovered if you stop now. System restore can restore Windows but not all your files and folders.

In 'Everything' did you search for jpg as well as jpeg? There are many free utilities that can recover accidentally deleted files but the less you do now, the better the chances of recovery. I'm signing out shortly as I need some sleep.

OTOH, what I said being said, a lot of us here are running Windows 11 successfully on old (some very old) computers. If you're on a budget, you might try re-using those two old components. I just wouldn't depend on them to handle anything very important to you.

You could use Windows own diagnostics to check the ESP partition if you are confident to try this

On Windows, I used DISKPART to assign the EFI System partition a letter. Fired up DISKPART, and typed LIST DISK to find the disk, followed by SELECT DISK <N> (where is the drive number). Followed the same steps to find the proper partition (i.e. LIST PARTITION followed by SELECT PARTITION <N>), and then simply typed ASSIGN LETTER = X to have Windows mount the partition to letter X. Then opened CMD with administrative access. Ran CHKDSK X: /f /r

This advice from Superuser found here.

@kelper
Rest well, old friend.

System Restore does not restore any personal User Files, like your pictures.

If you have renamed any of your JPEGs and know one of the names, do a search for that particular pic, if you can find it, you will most likely find the others in the same folder. The folder may have been dragged into another folder by accident or got renamed.

This is another reason to always keep a current Backup or much better, do a System Image from a 3rd party app and save it to an External USB drive. If disaster strikes or a folder disappears, you can easily restore the image and be back in business in minutes not hours or days.

LesFerch said:

One common reason for a folder disappearing is accidentally doing an undo (ctrl-z) in Explorer. If the last procedure that occurred was a move of that folder from a location that no longer exists, the the undo results in the folder getting deleted (and it doesn't go in the Recycle bin). Just one possible explanation.

Click to expand...

I have just tried moving a folder from Pictures to Documents. CTRL+Z returned it to Pictures. Can you test this on your system?

@BigOleDummy

Have you tried using Everything and filtering for Picture? This will list files with every type of extension, just in case you have accidentally changed any.

kelper said:

I have just tried moving a folder from Pictures to Documents. CTRL+Z returned it to Pictures. Can you test this on your system?

Click to expand...

I was thinking of moving a folder from an external drive and then undo after it's disconnected, but Explorer seems to handle that just fine.

It's actually a copy, edit, undo scenario where data loss can occur. See:

LesFerch said:

I was thinking of moving a folder from an external drive and then undo after it's disconnected, but Explorer seems to handle that just fine.

It's actually a copy, edit, undo scenario where data loss can occur. See:

How to lose your work using Undo Copy in Windows - mihai.fm

mihai.fm

Click to expand...

Well, I tried that too and the file I had copied and then edited was, indeed, lost. (But the original was still there).
However, if I move a document, edit it, then 'undo move', the file is returned to its original location WITH the edits.

I've used EaseUS data recovery before when a drive died and it's good and found everything. Some photo files were damaged and it repaired them. Is it possible the drive could be on it's way out? Maybe try that to recover the folder then back everything up to an external hard drive and test the drive. Can't remember if it was free or not. I think I paid for it but it was worth it.

Edit -there is a free version but I decided to pay for the full version which includes repair of photos, videos and documents.

You can also use the free app Recuva.
This app is great for restoring accidentally deleted files. It is not that great restoring files from a failing drive, Easeus is better at that.