So tonight my sister called me with a computer problem. She said, “Can your hard drive just stop working or something because I turned on my computer and all of my documents and pictures were gone”. Well this was weird, and I didn’t really know what to say. I asked a few questions and everything appeared to be right. I told her to just come over and we could take a look.
When she got here we turned on the computer and it prompted her with the normal Windows XP login. When all of the personal settings were loaded (which took forever), the desktop was blank and the My Documents lead to a blank folder with the sample Music and Photos. It basically looked like a virgin install of XP.
Well I accidentally clicked on the Picasa icon and the program started up. Right away, the program started finding all of the files on the hard drive. As it turned out, all of the files on her computer weren’t gone, Windows had just gotten all messed up. Somehow, and I don’t know how yet, the registry or something was changed, because a new used file had been created named ‘TEMP’ and all of the shortcuts were remapped to those folders.
Even though I don’t know exactly why things got all messed up, at least the files were not deleted. That would have been the worst. We backed them up to an external hard drive and then tried to run a virus scan and spy ware remover. They both ran and of course found nothing. Likely I will just reinstall the OS and all of the documents so her computer will be healthy again. So even though It isn’t fixed, Picasa helped us find the missing files in a jiffy. Thanks Picasa, therefore, thank you Google!