Non-Destructive Recovery Help
 

Under some very bad advice, I ran a Non-Destructive System Recovery to reinstall a few files that were missing from system. With that completed, I found that all of my saved e-mails were gone. Silly me believing that when it says it won't remove any information, I should believe them.

My question is, is there a way to get these e-mails back? I know you can find stuff from Outlook but I use Earthlink for my default e-mail system. The Earthlink tech said it was probably gone but I'm hoping that there is another way. Would a deleted file recovery program work for this type of issue? Thanks.

Possibly, but every time you use the system and something writes to the disk you run the risk of overwriting what you're looking for. Are you on the system now? If so, stop. The first thing to do when files are deleted or there's a disk problem, stop. Shut it off. Don't install/remove anything. Just stop until you can get help and make your plan.

Ideally, where lots of data is in question, you connect the drive to another system and use recovery utils with the drive as a passive bystander. Slower but as effective is to use a CD or floppy boot tool. Something like knoppix or ultimatebootcd4windows. The worst choice is to keep using the system where background things like temp files, disk indexing, or defrag utils will progressively overwrite the vulnerable data.

Assuming you're on another system now, download and burn a <a href="http://www.knoppix.org/">knoppix</a> CD. Google ntfsundelete, or ask for the next steps here.

Thanks for the response. I actually recontacted Earthlink and found someone who was able to help instead of dismiss my problem as the first guy did.

Now that I have that completed, I can get my computer to keep Earthlink as the default e-mail program. I think it has something to do with the cookies but I've allowed all cookies from their site. Is there a setting somewhere that I may have missed that deletes all cookies on exit?