Restoring old documents found by search engine Everything from $recycle.bin of hard drive D of another PC

Question

I'm trying to recover some old files whose status I do not quite understand.

Back in ~2006, I accidently deleted some essential Word documents from my then D:\ -hard drive (Windows ME). Some years later, all old then D:-data got copied onto the D:-hard drive of a new Windows Vista PC.

Today, I occasionally searched for the term *.doc within the search engine Everything on that very Win Vista PC, and this is what I got: (extract)

So it seems that by moving the hard disc content off the old computer to the new one, the recycle bin also got copied (?).

I can indeed rightclick those files and select "restore", but nothing happens afterwards. The listed file remains in the list, nothing gets actually restored.

Are those files dead links? Why do they exist and why is their size still being saved? I can't imagine them to be, because their size is given. Could there be another possibilty to restore them? I already tried out recovery programs like Recuva and Archive - Undelete. Both gave me a list of 153,640 files, of which almost all were ignored due to too much damage to the file. The resulting list included only about 10 document files, none of them helpful.

Any idea is very much welcome. Regards

Additional infos: I ensured my privilege to view system files within Windows. When I open the given path (S-1-S-21-27...-1002), a folder is being shown with about 20 files in it, none of them being edited before 2012.

Answer 1

To be honest, the listing you present indicates that some of the files are modified 2009-2010, so I dunno these are the files you deleted back in 2004. But in principle the recycler might be copied from one hard drive to another, depending how it was done (you do not mention your method).

So, I'd use the following steps in a command line windows (open one by Start Menu > Run > Type in "cmd") to check on those files. (In the following commands are write like this.)

1. d:

   changes to drive D

2. cd $RECYCLE.BIN\S-1-S-21-27[TAB]

   changes into the recycler directory given by your search (use the Tab-Key to autocomplete the long path)

3. dir /a

   gives a file listing, including hidden files (parameter /a)

4. xcopy /S /H . d:\restored

   • copies everything (including directories (/S) and hidden files (/H)) to d:\restored.

   • answer the question Does d:\restoredspecify a file name or directory name on the target? with D for directory

   • Note: the dot denotes the current directory as source.

Now, you can browse in d:\restored with Windows Explorer like in any other directory. The original files in the recycler are not touched, because we copied everything, so you should be save.

Note: As you deleted those files with Windows ME, there should be a file called INFO or INFO2 which contains the original filenames. Be sure that you enable hidden files to see it in the Windows Explorer. (Unfortunately, I can't test this part, because Windows 7 seems to have a different mechanism.)