Massive data/system loss

CCleaner for Windows
1

Hello Everyone

I was working on someones computer (I am not a professional, but I usually do pretty well...) and I couldn't log into their user account. So, I ran CCleaner in Safe Mode and chose to include "Documents & Settings" in the searched directories. The results were horrible. All of my friends data is gone, as well as anything I had downloaded in the account that I had created for myself. Our user accounts were hosed, and now the start menu is empty as well. I did a system restore back to yesterday, which appeared to succeed. I DID NOT expect that to restore any personal data, I just expected it to restore the system files. The start menu was still like it was before, empty. All of the original programs are still in the Program Files directory, but the Start Menu is still empty.

In the past, I have only ever used CCleaner to clean temporary internet files, and whatever else is checked by default. I have never had it clean out at least two users My Documents folder. In my humble opinion, only including the "Documents & Settings" directory in the items that CCleaner scans should only result in the cleaning of the same files that would normally be cleaned if I ran it as a normal user, and NOT in safe mode. It should not result in the removal of two users data.

So, since there seems to be no hope for recovering the lost personal data, I am just wondering if this has ever happened to anyone else before. Also, if running CCleaner in Safe Mode and including the directory that I did has results like this, how can I run CCleaner for all the users on a Windows XP based system without removing the entire contents of the My Documents directories and hosing the Start Menus?

I eagerly await anyone's wisdom on my situation.

Steven P. Ulrick

2

CC does not scan for junk files like other programs,

It has a list of locations of files explicitly, by adding "Documents & Settings" to the include list in the folders to wipe.. it wiped it out. -so its working as intended and deleted all it could from documents and settings.

Best thing to do, to attempt recovery of data (No Guarantee of getting a working system without having to reinstall),

would be to place the Hard-drive as a slave in another PC, and run recovery programs (like piriforms recuva) to recover what you can to another drive

(do not recover to the same drive as you will likely write over files you want to recover)

If there are invaluable files you can't recover you may have to pay a professional data recovery tech to recover files. (not cheep so it would have to very important)

3
So, I ran CCleaner in Safe Mode and chose to include "Documents & Settings" in the searched directories. The results were horrible.

If you're stating you manually inputted into the CCleaner 'Options->Include' area it simply did exactly as instructed by you in wiping out the 'Documents and Settings' folder structure.

You could try Recuva doing a Deep Scan on the partition this happened on in an attempt to recover needed irreplaceable work, documents, music, etc., but that's only going to "possibly work" if you didn't use any of CCleaner's secure delete modes. If you did use CCleaner's secure delete option the files are most likely gone for good.

Unfortunately the end result is you're probably looking at a complete format, and reinstall of Windows.