Windows 10: SysPrep deleted files. Recover?

I'm going to start by saying I know very little about software, most of my knowledge in PC's are hardware related.

I had just replaced parts in my PC for upgrades, a forum had said I can run SysPrep to remove unused drivers from old hardware, and from there I can install the new drivers for my current hardware. I accidentally ran it without changing any options, and I ran it under "Enter System Out-Of-Box Experience (OOBE) with Generalize off. I had attempted to stop it so I could fix this, but it went and did it anyway. Now all the files I had in Desktop and Documents and missing. Pretty much everything from my "Users" folder in Windows.

I have multiple drives, so I didn't lose a whole lot, but what I did lose was relatively important, and some are projects I had worked on for 16+ hours. I ran Windows File Recovery thinking that might help, it recovered 4500+ files, but I don't think it recovered anything useful (Mostly corrupt jpegs from some applications and other small files).

I have read some posts from a long time ago about something similar happening to others, but they have easily recovered their files as SysPrep loaded a second user profile. In my case, it seems to have overwritten my main user profile and I haven't been able to recover my files that way.

I'm really hoping there's a fix for this, simple or not. I need these files back and I don't have the time or money to go through a data recovery service. Please help me. Thank you

submitted by /u/EMB3R14
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:)

 

How to recover files off a HDD from a deleted partition? help!!!

Thanks for your reply. I used my m8s program and it worked like a dream, recovered all the files and also deleted ones from yrs back, was amazed how well it did. Next step is i will use that Partition Table Doctor to recover the deleted partition. Thanks for the link *Toast :toast:

 

Recover deleted files from recycle bin?

EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard.

I have deleted accidentally 2TB files, all recovered back.

 

recover deleted data???

That was the word on the street (so to speak) all the way back to the DOS days.
Files are never really erased by the OS. Most every OS just marks the Directory entry for the file, that it was deleted. In the olden days, the filename "Mark.txt" would look like "?ark.txt".

PCTools had an undelete command in it's file manager. All you had to do was provide the first letter for a deleted file and PCTools would recover the file for you.

But if someone had deleted files and then did a defrag, well it was 99% certain that any deleted file was overwritten and gone forever.
Many logs are written to during bootup and can overwrite deleted file space, so the less activity performed on a drive after file deletion, the better the chance of recovering those files.

I too would like to know the name of that recovery program. I have one tucked away someplace but right now I don't even remember the name of it.*Confused

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow*Cool