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any way to retrieve old profile?
My husband and I just bought a Dell Inspiron with Windows 7 Home on it. He bought it for use at work, and when he took it to work, they upgraded it to Windows 7 Professional. I don't know who they had working on this, but it seems that they didn't make a back-up of anything first, and my husband doesn't know enough about computers to have thought to make one, and he didn't realize that the people doing this to his computer might just not know what they were doing.
Anyway, EVERYTHING he had on the computer before is GONE...right down to the drivers for the wireless and the BLU-ray disc drive. I can put that stuff back, but he had also just finished writing a sermon on the computer, and that's gone too, of course. A lot of work that unfortunately he didn't save anywhere else.
If we take this in to a shop tomorrow, what are the chances that they'll be able to retrieve anything that was there before? We are hoping this is possible!
ieee488
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11.1K Posts
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January 22nd, 2011 19:00
Almost none.
Some people don't differentiate between upgrade and a new install.
If an upgrade is done the files should have been untouched. If the hard drive formatted to put Windows 7 Professional on it, then your personal data files are gone.
msgale
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January 22nd, 2011 20:00
There is one possibility. I am not sure if it is part of Windows 7 professional or not. I know it works in Wind 7 Ultimate. It also depends if the disk was reformatted or not. But here goes - during the installation process, and under the right conditions a direct directory is created in the root directory called "Windows.old" or possibility "windows.001" Under that directory, you will find everything from the prior windows installation. Your Home directory will be c:\windows.old\users\ . Hope this helps.