Impossible Crash and restore

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olivwe102

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Hi there,

To start my issue i need to give a little background. 18 months ago I upgraded my computer from Windows Vista to Windows 7 (on the poor advice of PC World). It was horrific, and when I went back and asked them why they recommended it, they just replied, they don't recomend upgrading OS, go figure, not sure why they were selling me it but that's a lost cause.

I took the Computer to a repair store to have it rolled back to windows Vista as Windows 7 severed the recovery partition so I couldn't access it. they told me that it was inaccessible, and that they formatted the hard drive and then reinstalled a version of windows Vista. I got he computer back, everything was perfect.. that was until this morning when I turned the computer on and it crashed on start up. I restarted it and it loaded up a 1 year old version of my computer running Windows 7 crappy upgrade. Ive lost 1000's of documents, 5 years of university work and apart from that, the computer is now nothing more then a heater as its so slow my old mobile can use the internet faster.

My question is this; how is that possible? Formatted Hard drive implies NOTHING is left, yet there was 100Gb worth of data still hiding that wasn't appearing on the C: drive yesterday. does anyone know if there is any way to undo this or at least tell me how its possible as I honestly cant work it out, it did a complete restore in less then 60 seconds, a factory restore on that machine took over 30 minutes!

Now that its reverted I can see Windows.old appearing, which from my understanding, is the original partition of Windows Vista that came with the PC, but the recovery section is gone as Microsoft Windows 7 update removed it (another thing they fail to mention). is there any way to access this as I don't have a recovery CD, they don't issue them with PC's now (which is a joke).

I'm a trainee teacher and due to start placement tomorrow morning and literally steaming at the ears that this has happened NOW! so any words of comfort or an explanation of how everything I thought I knew about computers seems to be wrong would be a nice relief. I thought the data was gone, but like a cockroach, Win 7 keeps coming back!

Thanks
 
If you look in the Windows.old folder you may be able to find some of your documents and files. You can try recovering them.

How to restore your personal files after you perform a custom installation of Windows Vista or of Windows 7

With the problem you are describing it seems that the issue was not correctly resolved by the repair shop the first time.
I would recommend you try saving the files that you can.
Sometime you can order Recovery Media from the manufacturer site. What brand/model PC is this?
If you are able to get the Recovery Media you can then do a clean install of the OS.
 
I've worked out what happened, when the repair guys told me they fixed it they were not entirely honest.. Rather then fixing my C drive, they stuck yet another version of windows on my D drive and swapped the slave and master drives over so it booted from D instead. But of course they failed failed to mention that in their report..

I've got all my data back now, I think that the computer had a little hiccup in startup and reset the bios, thus telling it to boot from the hard drive I thought had been formatted and reset, but instead was a slave drive and ghost of windows 7.

I'm exceedingly happy to know what had happened there, and it only took 6 hours of my Sunday too!

Cheers for the reply, the best advice of all is if in doubt, try something you think will be stupid(in this case boot from D drive)
 
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