All data wiped off.

[lissie]

My laptop has been completely wiped clean while it was switched off.
I have reinstalled a few programs but have lost all my photos in Photo Gallery.
Is there any way i can get them back?
Many thanks.

[Suff]

Lissie, it depends on how the Laptop was wiped and why and whether it was encrypted or not.

I've never heard of Laptops doing something like this without at least some action from someone.

The first place I would look is in the File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) and look for c:\Windows.old. If the system has done a clean reinstall, it should have stored the old files there.

Beyond that you are looking at file recovery programs and only if the laptop was not encrypted.

[Workingman]

Lissie, images are stored in various formats but for photos it is usually .jpeg or .jpg.

Use windows explorer, as Suff mentions, but in the left pane just do a single left click on your C:\ drive to bring up the folders in the right pane. Now, up at the top right, you should see a "Search" box. Go to it and type in *.jpg and press Enter. Any files matching the criteria will appear in the right pane. Righ click on any one and from the menu choose Properties - the new pop-up should show the location. Also do *.jpeg.

You can search for anything this way. The asterisk * is a wildcard to represent any name a file has and the part after the dot . is the file type - usually three letters. Forex: *.doc will search for any document, *.xls will look for spreadsheets, *.txt will look for text files, and so on.

Other image formats to try: *.TIFF *.GIF *.BMP and *.PNG

[lissie]

Thanks to you both for your help.
Son came today and had a look at my Touchscreen as it has gone wrong again. He is into IT and says it is my hard drive that is going. He will put a new one in when he comes again so in the mean time i will have to use my IPad or see if i can get my old lappy going.
Once again many thanks.

[Workingman]

It is a shame, Lissie, but nothing lasts forever.

However, once the drive is swapped out it could be put in a caddy and subjected to interrogation by recovery software, as Suff says. It all depends on how valuable you feel some of your photos are.

I do not think that I would bother with the old lappy, it will be well past its use by date. I have one with XP and I only use it as storage when I want space on my main one - I just cut and paste things on to a pen drive and move them over.

[Suff]

I second the caddy approach. However I will say I have had best results with a Linux Live disk.

Windows and USB and a broken drive tend to produce poor results.