Recuva not listing thousands of files. Perhaps not deleted?

[dean123]

Hello all. I'm brand new here, and just downloaded Recuva to help me with a situation I am not even sure what to do.

 

All was fine this afternoon - until I started messing with user accounts.

Here is what I WANTED to do. I had two accounts on my pc, one named Dean and the other Guest. Dean had full admin privileges, but I did not want it to. So, I did not think it through before I acted, and this is what I THINK I remember doing:

 

I renamed Dean to Admin leaving it with full privileges. I created another account Dean that did not have Admin privileges. Then, in the user accounts lists, a mysterious account Dean_2 or something like that poppped up. I deleted it, thinking it some old account I had from years ago. It never asked me "Do you want to delete Dean2 files?" or anything like that.

 

Well, the Dean account had gigabytes of user data in its My Documents folder. But now, the new Dean account has nothing in it, nor does the Admin account. That is when I downloaded Recuva to my flash drive, thinking all those files must have been deleted by Windows somehow. Recuva finds lots of files I deleted long ago, but none of the thousands from my old 'Dean' account (even with a deep scan). Which makes me wonder: Are they really deleted at all? Yet I've looked everywhere, tried many different searches of the whole disk drive to not avail. What is also very weird is that my C: drive still shows about the same amount of space used & free as it used to before I did any of this - another thing that makes me think that Windows does not consider the files as deleted at all. Yet I cant find them anywhere.

 

I'm really confused!

Dean

[Augeas]

What folders show under c:\Documents and settings?

[dean123]

What folders show under c:\Documents and settings?

 

Hi Augeas. When I check as admin under that dir, I see these folders:

 

Administrator

All Users

Dean

Dean.LOEW-LAPTOP

Default User

 

When I put the cursor over those directories, the automatic info box tells me these sizes, respectively:

 

1.8 GB

110 MB

Folder is Empty

22 MB

22 MB

 

Since the Administrator folder was big, I checked carefully in there, but it is so big because of some huge Google Desktop data files.

 

Under "My Computer" when I check the properties of my C drive, it says the total size is 51.2 GB, free space is 10 GB. I know Windows XP and the program files dont take up 40 GB. This gives me hope that my files are still around somewhere.

 

Thanks

Dean