Recover deleted favourites

Is it possible?

[munchiez]

A Firefox extension has kindly toasted my dads favourites from the Documents & Settings folder and unfortunately he's got no backup.

I've tried a System Restore with no luck.

I tried using Active Recovery to try and retrieve them, but it's only managed to get a few. I wondered if it might be worth trying GetDataBack as well, but this would involve a lot of messing about switching hard drives.

I wondered if it might be possible to recover the favourites from the Registry? If I open regedit and go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\Explorer\MenuOrder\Favourites I can see the structure of the folders, but each folder only has the empty string (Default) and a binary value "Order". It looks like the binary values might contain the bookmarks, but I can't retrieve them so I don't know!

If anyone could shed some light as to how I might extract the information from the registry it'd be greatly appreciated!

Chris

[Jon_King]

Do you have more than one login user on that PC? If so there may be a copy in that users folder.

[munchiez]

There are a couple of other users, but none of the favourites are in their folders - only the default Windows ones. The same goes for the All Users and Default User folders unfortunately.

[Leosghost]

You could try using "forensic" software ..if there has been no defrag yet on the drive you may get something back ..allthough this sort of soft is better at recovering images than folder info ..most is available as try before you buy ..so you can test it ..
try "pc inspector" or "disk investigator"..you may have to read all the info you want line by line and also read by eye all the cluster areas that are on the disk ( hope for your sake it's only a 4 gig disc : ) ..

There are much better progs that will cut out alot of the time spent reading however I'm presuming you don't want to pay a lot ..

good luck :)

[chriswragg]

Unless any files are deleted by a special program, all files remain in hidden file partitions on the hard drive.

I use a free program called Restoration which means you can recover any deleted file(s) from your computer, even if the have been deleted out of the recycle bin.

See This page [www3.telus.net] and download the file.

On the program, type something like .lnk in the search box.

Beware this program will look through ALL deleted items! :)