Okay, something is really -ed with my Windows Xp.

About 13 days ago, it shut down my pc and autoupdated. When I logged on the next morning... every single one of my world files for achaea were gone. Just.. gone. And of course my backups were scrambled because its been years since I saved, havent messed with it much.

11 years worth of work on tweaking my system to my like just gone. Aliases, fonts everything.

I spent this entire time trying to redo what I could, getting headaches because something I was so effing familiar with .. was suddenly gone.

I come home from work today.. and Windows XP was just locking itself up trying to shut down my pc to autoupdate.. I restart the pc and guess what... no world files.


Seriously, this is getting me to the point of quitting. I do not have another 11 years to build this back, and its just frustrating. Especially since goryllin is such a target, and I dont really remember my other chars since I just used mush to log onto them

Is there any way to go back and fix this, or figure out where the hell its stuffing my world files and WHY the - it would be deleting them in the first place? They are saved in a folder on my desktop, and is apparently the only thing being deleted. Its -ing insane and crazy and makes no effing sense.

Oh, by the way, each time its updated, I try to use a save point... and none exist any more.

Are they the only word files that are being deleted or are all other word documents being deleted as well?

WORLD, Berenene.

EDIT: My best suggestion is to disable the auto-updating and just update when you feel safe in doing so. It's a weird situation for sure, though.

Ok, I sent you PMs and messages, and now I've gotten this working. I swear, disappear for five years and nothing works anymore... Anyway, it sounds like you got hit with the infamous "Desktop Cleanup Service". You need to run an undelete program ASAP or the computer'll overwrite that data. I haven't used windows in a couple years now, but this one: http://www.officerecovery.com/freeundelete/ seems to be a good start. I'm looking for other more reliable ones. If you do manage to get them back, get them OFF the desktop. Windows likes to enable that damn thing every once in a while and it wipes anything off your desktop that it thinks you don't use enough. Alternatively, try looking to see if you have a system restore point ( http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/h...temrestore.mspx ) that'll take it back. It'll probably make you redo the updates if you do, but that's a small price to pay. There's another couple options for what happened, but they're... less fixable. Here's hoping something works.

EDIT: Try this one instead: http://dmitrybrant.com/diskdigger

DAMN L's!

Lolberenene.

Sanaki, I thought the desktop cleaner-upper put unused icons into a new folder on the desktop, rather than deleting them. At least, that's what the tooltip that popped up occasionally always told me (albeit on XP).

Theoretically yes, if it works right. Remember, this is Windows we're talking about. Made by Microsoft? Working correctly is a bit of a rarity. I've had the desktop cleanup wizard wipe out a 90 page project I had for school once. Luckily, I got it back intact, but it was a week after the due date. Like I said though, there are other options, they're just gloomy. Still, that second program I linked to can do a surface scan and find them. It may take an age and a half, but it'll find them whether they've been deleted, moved, abducted, molested... It'd take something seriously wrong with the partition to prevent that working as long as you run it soon enough.

There are two types of computer users - those who have lost data, and those who are about to. That really blows Gory, but I bet you'll back up your files now.

Edit: And never ever allow Windows to auto-update. Select the security ones by hand and ignore the rest.

Very true, but you can also just not use Windows. That's becoming much more feasible these days. Personally I use Kubuntu, OpenSUSE, and Mac OSX Leopard (Intel).

Exactly. I run OSX and Ubuntu in a virtual machine.

I have it automatically update. I've never had a problem.
And I've never randomly lost any info.


My other box is linux, Ubuntu to be more exact. I had to go with the most user friendly version because I knowknew almost nothing about linux. (I learn by necessity).

Well clearly you're in the latter of the two groups.

Windows auto updates should be turned off because it downloads things that are unnecessary/broken and it opens up security holes.

Nevermind

First time I have ever had this problem. I had two locations for the files, I had a my docs folder with them in it too. Everything to do with achaea Worldfiles is gone. Thats all.

Nothing else.

Any time I try to make it to a system restore point, I can click a date but then it just stares at me impassively. I can click NEXT for eternity and nothing happen. It will only ever let me restore to a point 32 seconds after its autoupdate.

I have ignored autoupdate because it only ran every 5 months or so in the past, and no problems. Suddenly its doing it very often and when it does, I lose only my achaea stuff.

Seriously, since this is now three times its happened, its starting to become one of those, eliminate the impossible and the implausible is true things. I feel hacked

This is very bad... Micro$oft releases security patches on the second Tuesday of every month, you should have been updating quite a bit more frequently.

I recommend backing up everything on an external hard drive, that way you don't have to worry about restore points.

did... 4 years ago?

Files corrupted

You've got terrible luck my friend.

I'm not going to lose info. I actually know what I'm installing. I'm in group C: People that learned from everyone elses -ups.

Why not just start running a WSUS. Better control over what's installed.