I've messed up REALLY BAD and need HELP!

[Duma49]

I use to think of myself as a compentent computer person. I can rebuild systems and a wizbang at general troubleshooting. But, today I made the mother of all errors. I was doing a full system recovery on a friends computer and didn't back up her pictures folder. I got everything else in her My Documents Folder, but somehow missed this one. The sad part of it (aside from loosing her as a friend over this I'm sure) is that it contained pictures of her son who recently passed away. And this is just killing me. I ALWAYS grab everything in the My Documents folder. I feel like crap.
(Sorry that I'm venting while asking for help.)

So, I don't know if there is any way to retreive the pictures. This is way out of my league. I can't undo it with System Restore because I did a complete Recovery using the HP Recovery partition of the drive. Meaning, it wiped itself and reinstalled everything factory fresh. I've been googling like crazy for the past 6 hours and I'm at my wits end.

If there is anyone who could help me I would be eternally grateful! Although I'm pretty sure I screwed the pooch royally here. I hate screwing up.

[Duma49]

I came to this forum looking for help. Seems I had a really difficult problem that no one could touch. Heck, that no one would even reply to. So, maybe I can help some of YOU people.

After fretting for a few day and doing more and more research, I found a solution that fixed everything. Not only did I recover her lost pictures (and save our friendship) I found EVERYTHING she had ever had and was able to suprise her with much more than she originally lost. (She had accidentally deleted some files and photos herself a few weeks prior, go figure.) But the program I found is FREE, easy to use, and while it takes a little time, it will find anything and everything on a reformatted hard drive.

Now, why, you ask, am I coming back here with a solution to my own problem that I had to find on my own, when no one here whould even venture even an opinion on a possible fix for my problem? It's because one day, one of you may be in need of help just like I was. And I gave you help while everyone else just sat by and did nothing.

Try: PhotoRec - CGSecurity Amaizing, Free, and gets the job done.

Your Welcome!

Duma