Upgrade from ME to XP, lost desktop docs

Hello,

A friend of mine recently upgraded his system from Windows ME (pre-installed on his HP system) to Windows XP (home edition I think). Reason for this is because his system got ******* up after installing some critical updates from the windowsupdate.com site.

He had some MS Word 2000 documents saved on his Desktop for easy access to them. Since the XP upgrade, they are now gone. I've searched in vain for the docs, using wildcards before and after the name, but no luck at all. I don't recall ever seeing this happen on an upgrade; usually your desktop remains the same. However, his system was in a strange state after the windowsupdate critical installs (his system was being automatically rebooted, and finishing the configuration, but then he gets a "WINDOWS COULD NOT UPGRADE THE FILE %1 FROM %2 %1: %2" coming up during startup, and couldn't get past it.)

Is there any chance these docs got saved somewhere else? From what I understand from him, they were saved onto his desktop. I would have thought it would also have saved a copy into the My Documents dir, but I guess not.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Paul Mendes
cintoman@cox.net

 

Paul - the desktop is a horrible place to put anything other than shortcuts. And I'm afraid your friend has just had 1st hand experience with one of the main reasons.

If you can't find traces of any of the documents using a wildcard search, chances are excellent they are gone without a trace. I suspect the user account on ME was corrupt and may have been causing some of his problems. In that case, the upgrade may well have resulted in XP trashing the existing account and creating a new one with the same name. Most of the data with the old user account make it safely thru the upgrade but the desktop is tied so closely to the user account that it may not have.

The above is a guess only but .....

I would do more searching though. Possible that if you are looking for endings, they were changed so you'd need to restrict your search to parts of the main file name.

You might do well to download and install a copy of Agent Ransack. It's a much better search tool than Windows Explorer.