I'm trying to help a friend who is manager of a very large parking operation. A computer they use to store important customer data, namely info for a frequent parker program is dead, won't power up.
I don't have a spare power supply handy to troubleshoot with so I removed the hard drive and installed it as a slave in another computer.
I can access all the files on this drive, appears to be intact. However I'm told there should be several large spreadsheets with all the important data but I can't seem to find them.
A certain employee is responsible for backing up these files on a weekly basis and has neglected to do so lately. She reported this pc being down this morning and I'm told is being very vague about what happened.
Here's what I did to attempt to locate these files: Simply went to My Computer, right clicked on the drive and clicked search. Then I searched for *.xls. All it came back with was a few sample spreadsheets and stuff. Nothing like what I'm looking for.
This story is getting long but I guess I'm looking for some insight here. Being that this drive is not originally from the pc i'm running it on now is there some other method I should use to find these .xls files?
I guess the next step is attempting data recovery with software for that purpose or taking it to a lab. Just trying to figure out what I can do now from home.
A catastrophe it will be for my friend if this data can't be recovered.
I don't have a spare power supply handy to troubleshoot with so I removed the hard drive and installed it as a slave in another computer.
I can access all the files on this drive, appears to be intact. However I'm told there should be several large spreadsheets with all the important data but I can't seem to find them.
A certain employee is responsible for backing up these files on a weekly basis and has neglected to do so lately. She reported this pc being down this morning and I'm told is being very vague about what happened.
Here's what I did to attempt to locate these files: Simply went to My Computer, right clicked on the drive and clicked search. Then I searched for *.xls. All it came back with was a few sample spreadsheets and stuff. Nothing like what I'm looking for.
This story is getting long but I guess I'm looking for some insight here. Being that this drive is not originally from the pc i'm running it on now is there some other method I should use to find these .xls files?
I guess the next step is attempting data recovery with software for that purpose or taking it to a lab. Just trying to figure out what I can do now from home.
A catastrophe it will be for my friend if this data can't be recovered.