[Leica] Computer Help Needed: Deleted Files

[red735i at earthlink.net (Frank Filippone)]

Taking Brian's advice one step further..... and without doing anything to
your computer.......  from the Windows Help files.......
----------------------------------------------------------

To delete or restore files in the Recycle Bin 

On the desktop, double-click Recycle Bin. 
Do one of the following: 
To restore an item, right-click it, and then click Restore. 
To restore all of the items, on the Edit menu, click Select All, and then on
the File menu, click Restore. 
To delete an item, right-click it, and then click Delete. 
To delete all of the items, on the File menu, click Empty Recycle Bin. 

 Notes

Deleting an item from the Recycle Bin permanently removes it from your
computer. Items deleted from the Recycle Bin cannot be restored. 
You can also delete items by dragging them into the Recycle Bin. If you
press SHIFT while dragging, the item is deleted from your computer without
being stored in the Recycle Bin. 
Restoring an item in the Recycle Bin returns that item to its original
location. 
To retrieve several items at once, hold down CTRL, and then click each item
that you want to retrieve. When you have finished selecting the items that
you want to retrieve, on the File menu, click Restore. 
If you restore a file that was originally located in a deleted folder, the
folder is recreated in its original location, and then the file is restored
in that folder. 
The following items are not stored in the Recycle Bin and cannot be
restored: 
Items deleted from network locations. 
Items deleted from removable media (such as 3.5-inch disks). 
Items that are larger than the storage capacity of the Recycle Bin.
Related Topics

Frank Filippone
red735i@earthlink.net

When a file is deleted on a Windows machine, it is not actually erased.
Rather, its name is removed from the folder that contained it, and the disk
space that it occupies is placed on a "free list" of available space.

When any file is created, ever, for any reason, the program creating the
file asks Windows to give it some disk space, and then it puts its data into
that disk space and then records the existence of that new file in a folder
somewhere.

What destroys your images is not deleting them. What destroys them is
creating new files on top of them. The most important thing for you to do is
to avoid all activities on your computer that will create files. In
particular, you should avoid downloading or installing a software package,
even one that recovers deleted files. This is a bit of a quandary, because
it means that if you didn't already have deleted-file recovery software on
your computer, then it's important that you not install any 
right now.

The very best way to recover your images is to physically remove the hard
drive from your computer, then connect it via USB to another computer on
which you had previously (before connecting your precious hard drive)
installed lost-file recovery software.


If you don't have a second computer, then your next-best choice is to buy a
bootable CD of a data recovery program, and then boot your computer from
that and have it operate on your hard drive while running from something
else. I have successfully used a program called "Active@" on a bootable CD,
but it did require temporary use of another PC to produce the actual
bootable disk.

If you have Norton Utilities or Norton SystemWorks installed, its built-in
Undelete feature works pretty well under many circumstances, and if you do
have it installed, that might be your best bet.