So, this weird thing happened. The "link" in the MFT from C:\Users\bushj (my user profile and stuff) was deleted but the INODE remained and was not marked as deleted (I think I am using the right terminology here...)
Anyways, basically, all the files that were in the users profile are still good, just they cannot be accessed since the directory C:\Users\bushj does not exist according to the MFT. But Recuva was able to find all of the files and reports them as Not Deleted. Yeah!
My question is, what is the best way to restore all these files?
So if I simply use Recuva to copy the files to a new directory and then place them where they should be all the files will be there twice because the original INODEs will not be marked as deleted for these files. The best solution would be to redo the MFT link to the proper INODE for the root directory which would hopefully fix everything.
I really don't want to just instantly kill >5GB of my hard drive since the files would be on there twice.
Would it be smart to just backup the entire computer to another drive, put the recovered files in the right places, and then format the hard drive and put the backup onto it?
Any ideas?