Computer Expert needed!
 

So I ran into the misfortune of my little cousin (7 yrs old) having had access to my computer for 4 hrs without me knowing about it. Fortunately, nothing to severe happened to my computer. I just lost some documents, bookmarked websites, and now I have tons of porn sites in my hard drive history (the little bastard thought they were funny).

My question is: How can I recover those bookmarked pages? I heard that everything you do on the computer is burned permantely into your hardrive or something. I would like to know how to gain access to it and recover my lost documents as well as those webpages. I need them for research on my project. If possible, I'd also like to get rid of those porn site "residue." It's bad enough that assholes can send you spyware already, if that stuff is in my computer, mroe spyware will come. I've earsed history and cookie for internet explorer and firefox, then I used spybot to get rid of any spyware. Am I 100% clean now? or is there a method to be even mre clean? More important than that, are those webpage bookmarks lost? It was a big pain to find those sites. Thanks for any help!

You will need to spend a few hours editing your registry. Do a search on .com and you will be amazed. Be very judicious in your deletions

if youre running windows XP you cna do a system restore to a previous date. that would be the easiest way.

as far as document recovery, system restore should do that as well, but there are more involved methods that, if system restore does not work, i may be able to outline them here.

Try a Active Undelete (www.active-undelete.com) or try a google search about file recovery programs, sometimes are shareware.. they do recover files that were erased even from the recycle bin.

About the bookmarks, only I can tell you that try a google search.

search on what now?

I can't do a system restore, because the only restore point is when i first got the computer. I also need to delete those possible spyware targets. I also dont want my grandparents on my computer, and somehow the old porn sites pop up.

No problem. Reformat your hard disk 3 or 4 times then remove it and beat it to death with a 22 oz. ball peen hammer. Then pour gasoline on it and light it. After it is molten slag place it in a 2x2x2 foot box filled with concrete. When the concrete cures take the block and drop it into the pacific trench to a depth of at least 6000 feet. You should be ok.

it would be easier to take the hddr to the junk yard and stick it to one of those huge electronic magnet.

pete

I take it, from your sarcasm, I have nothing to worry about? My younger brother had a similar problem before. When one of our grandparents sat down to do something on his computer, random Italien porn sites constantly popped up. My parents still don't trust him on the computer.

I forgot, that goes in between the reformat and the ball peen hammer.http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/grin.gif

while working with hardwares for about 7 yrs before jumping over to software, one thing that amazed me about people with important data is that they rarely ever back up their hddr.

if the data is important enough that it needs to be recovered, it's worth awhile to back it up often enough to prevent from losing them. with price of dvd burner and so on going down every day, backing up 4.7gb of data shouldn't be of that much issue.

having said that, i do back up anything that's remotely important to me on dvd. it's a painless way to recover the data when someone decides to have fun on my computer.. like my 5 yr old son or his lil brother. there is nothing like fdisk, format, and reinstall to get rid of every trace of old data on the hddr.

pete

Assuming things haven't changed much in the past couple years since I stopped doing support regularly...

1: Do as little as possible to avoid overwriting disk sectors you may want to recover.
2: Check the recycle bin, then run a file unerase utility (like norton or what not)
3: Search your drive for moved files (quite often people accidentally move files, instead of deleting them with the same symptom--they're gone)
4: Check the drive one more time for files just in case you missed them.

After that, run all the anti-spyware tools you can find or whatever else might work. Personally, I don't use IE and I run at a low security level, in order to prevent those things. I usually don't bother to recover a PC from such a state; I recover the data, wipe the system, and move on.

In the future, make another user account like the Guest account with limited priviledges. Put a simple password on your account, so that visitors will use the guest account instead of yours. It can be annoying, but better safe than...

With kids, my PC lasted at most 3 months between rebuilds until moved to Windows 2000 with restricted permissions. Now they've been very stable. It's pretty nice when visting users can't destroy things as they're in the visitor sandbox. (malicious people should be thrown out--fdisk isn't a cute joke)

Everything you do is NOT burned permanently burned onto your hard drive disc. Anything "deleted" is gone forever. When a disc gets "corrupted", data is not deleted and there are ways of trying to recover data.

All I can recommend is to Google for those sites that you had bookmarked.

Try hitting it with a hammer as hard as you can. I find that helps.

Oh, sure it is, if you have enough money... For most of us though, once any of the sectors the data is on are overwritten or the directory link overwritten, it's gone. The days of finding your file and putting it together ended at about 200MB drives. It took days to manually browse 200MB drives trying to repiece files from scattered clusters with limited results. I wouldn't dare do it today!

You can spend dozens to hundreds of hours fiddling with it and maybe get stuff, but after a few tries most of us all end up with Hai Hai's opinion, it's gone--move on. Don't spend a lot of time on it, because it may be a lost cause. Try the low hanging fruit (drive unerase utility), but realize it may very well come up with nothing. Consider future protections--backup data and restrict access. After a few such incidents, the hammer starts to sound really good!

i've often wondered about this...i know it's theoretically possible for governmenty types or whatnot to get information from formatted hds, so why not create some kind of super quasi-infinite hd where everything that's deleted is still there?

t'would be cool...

it could be csi style where you type a few words to do anything and it makes funny little beeping noises all the time....

7 year olds into porn? My thats worrying.

They do start at a young age dont they (most boys)

I'd ban my cousin from using my computer to prevent that from happening again.

We used to call those multi-session CDs, but then one day 640MB wasn't so infinite anymore...

Next time he's there, burry him in a pile of Lego. Thats what worked fine for me in the PC-less era. Lego, and the good old matches & lighterfluid. http://www.discussworldissues.com/fo...ilies/wink.gif

yeah... sure... that porn belongs to my seven year old cousin :P

10 points for originality

Because I have a reputation to keep on an online forum, I use my cousin as a scapegoat. You found me out! You must be very smart.