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The Hunt Begins
Sadly, hard drives have become less reliable over the past couple of years, as manufacturers yield to pressure to provide higher capacity at lower cost. Ask your friendly reseller, and chances are he'll tell you that he's been seeing unprecedentedly high failure rates across most manufacturers' IDE disks. (One reseller quoted up to a 40% return rate on some brands.) That makes disk-to-disk backups scary. That makes even the most reliable operating system unsafe. You can't have "safely" hidden files on a system if the disk it lives on is at risk of curling up and dying. And that means we have to know what those hidden Windows files are, and how to find them, and how to back them up.
A recent hard drive crash sent me on just that quest.
The disk had managed to corrupt itself to the point that it wouldn't boot, but enough was intact that it could be mounted as a secondary drive.
NOTE
Because the disk in this case was formatted as an NTFS volume, it had to talk to Windows 2000 Professional or XP Professional; file locations mentioned here apply to those operating systems.
Documents
Finding the user's documents was easy: The My Documents folder is top-of-mind for most users because they use it daily, and had been backed up. But E-mail, Internet favorites, cookies (at least the ones storing site login data), PDA files, and all sorts of other things stored hither and yon had to be ferreted out and rescued.
Then the hunt could continue in earnest.
TIP
Open Windows Explorer and correct one of those "helpful" Windows features that causes more trouble than it's worth (see Figure 1). Select Tools, Folder Options, click the View tab, and select the options to display the filename in the title bar and/or the address bar. Deselect the options that hide extensions of known file types and protected operating system files, and select the option to display hidden and system files. Then click Apply, and click the "Like Current Folder" button. You can now see everything that can be seen.
)
Figure
1 Stop Windows from "helping you" by hiding important files. This
is the Windows 2000 dialog; Windows XP differs slightly.
TIP
Why is this important? Simple: If you can't see it in a directory listing, Windows won't copy it. So you can copy the entire Documents and Settings folder, and unless you've changed those parameters, you'll only get a third of the actual data—and very little of the critical stuff. Nasty, but true.
E-mail and Address Book Information
Salvaging E-mail is usually near the top of everyone's list. If Outlook Express if the program of choice, its files can be found in the following oh-so-intuitive location:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Local Settings\Application
[ccc] Data\Identities {<a very long alphanumeric string unique to the UID>}
[ccc]\Outlook Express
Grab the whole Outlook Express directory, but note that this doesn't preserve your address book. That lives here:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Address Book
The address book file is called <username>.wab.
Outlook, on the other hand, by default stashes its local files here:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook
The critical files have the extension .pst—they contain mail, contacts, and so on that the user has stored locally. It's a good idea to search the entire drive for .pst files if you can, because users can manually create these archives and store them anywhere. If they're still using a version prior to Outlook 2000, do a search for files with the .pab extension to recover the Personal Address Book (Outlook 2000 and later dispense with this artifact).
Internet Explorer Favorites and Cookies
Many users have huge and complex Internet Favorites lists; you can rescue them from here:
\Documents and Settings\<username>Favorites
Grab the whole directory. While you're in the vicinity, cookies are just a couple of directories north:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Cookies
I'm inclined to omit cookies, but some users have stored site registration information that they can't easily recover otherwise, so the best thing to do is tuck the cookie info in a safe place and put them back if needed later.
Desktop Settings and Shortcuts
The Desktop folder contains the files and shortcuts on the user's Windows desktop:
\Documents and Settings\<username>\Desktop
This file is handy, but not mandatory unless the user stores actual files on the desktop rather than shortcuts to those files.
CAUTION
It's a Very Bad Idea to try to pull the entire Documents and Settings folder from a bad drive directly into the Documents and Settings folder on a newly built drive. Sure, it seems like a convenient way to put a system back to the way it was, but that's the problem—"the way it was" is not working, so you may corrupt the new operating system installation. Let Windows build a shiny new profile on the new drive so you have a clean operating system; then selectively drop in the above items from the old disk. I actually create an Old Disk directory, copy all the salvaged data into it, and then carefully put it into the new profile (after making a copy of the new operating system's version of the profile, just in case).
Other Files
Microsoft isn't the only vendor to put data files into unexpected places. If the owner of the sick drive is a Palm user, for example, you'll need to recover the user directory from here:
\Program Files\Palm\<Palm username>
Yes, the user can synch to the new drive to rebuild the active files, but unless you recover that directory, all the archives will be lost. When you rebuild the system, you can stuff those files under My Documents, by the way, and reconfigure Palm Desktop to find them there.
Scanner users with PaperPort also need extra help—the program dumps its data files in a subdirectory off its program directory. Many tax software packages and accounting programs do the same thing (and those files you don't dare lose). In fact, if at all possible it's a good idea to quickly skip through all the directories under Program Files (and any likely candidates off the root directory) to find misplaced data. And when you upgrade a program, make sure you know where the new version puts its data and adjust the backup accordingly—sometimes it changes, and you could have an unpleasant surprise when you need to restore data.