As a non technical person I don't know where to begin with this. The problem relates to my mother's PC, a Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo which is less than two years old. Today she woke to discover that EVERYTHING on her computer had disappeared and the start up restored all factory settings. It is like she just took it out of the box. All her files and folders have gone, her internet security software has gone, the works. I tried to do a system restore but the only restore point it would offer was earlier today! It's like her entire history for the past two years just vanished off the face of the earth. I ran something called Recuva but this only found fragments and most were marked 'unrecoverable' or something like that. What can have happened? Something overnight I am thinking - could an automatic update from Windows be responsible? She runs Vista, has (or at least had...) Zone Alarm Internet Security Suite plus System Mechanic and uses Firefox as her default browser (although this has been lost and I cannot currently reinstall as it won't complete). She is a 'silver surfer' and does not use her computer for much other than email, internet shopping and playing innocuous pixel hunting type games. She is inconsolable as she had a lot of 'family' stuff on there and now it's gone. Not all her photos were saved to disk, but fortunately most were. All help appreciated.

Why it happened will probably always be a mystery.

I would search the BIOS for any automatic settings such as "Restore on unrecoverable fault" or some such.

If the data were very valuable you could take this drive to a recovery service but you are talking at least several hundreds of dollars.

For the future making daily or at least regular backups would be a good idea.

We can find some links for you on good techniques for this process if you so desire.

This is my mother we're talking about - she wouldn't be able to back up data if her life depended on it What she has just discovered is that her email history and address books have been totally expunged from her (web based) email accounts too, although she is still able to log on with her normal addresses and passwords. Is this likely to be viral? How does a total computer failure wipe out your contents from personal AOL and Plusnet accounts when you are not even logged on at the time? I just want to know that if I repopulate her PC for her that the same thing isn't going to happen all over again!

Can you find her exact model?

SCALEO Desktop P Series ? Midrange PCs with discrete 3D graphics from Fujitsu

I see this "P" as well as an "L" and "EV". Perhaps reviewing the manual might shed some light on options.

I doubt it is anything viral. My guess as to the web servers is that they not only tagged her accounts with ID and password but perhaps established a direct link to her previous OS which being replaced is no longer apparent to their servers. Again that is just my initial speculation.

In the past was she able to access these sites from different computers?

Some email clients such as outlook and windows mail can be set to delete the email from the web server once it has been downloaded onto the computer. As for the address book perhaps she never entered any addresses into the online site but just into the client. An email client is not likely to upload a user's address book into the email server but will just store it on the computer.

I'm sorry for this tragedy. I've been there.

Originally Posted by susiecam

This is my mother we're talking about - she wouldn't be able to back up data if her life depended on it

There is software that can be set to back up file automatically. Some external hard drives come with such software. I don't know of anything third party software off the top of my head though except norton ghost but that costs 70 USD. Vista has some primitive software built in.

As for data recovery once the data has been wiped and overwritten the only way to get anything is to pay specialists several hundred they there are no guarantees.