I just ran recuva and now it ask me where to store everytime I pick a folder or location I get this msg "Do you want to restore to the same drive(this will reduce the chance of a successful recovery) So where can I store the information. Second question I did not know which files to restore so I selected all the green bottons and none of the yellow or red ones, is the the correct and will this hurt my system.

Hi the sarge, and welcome to Piriform.

Firstly, if you restore to the same drive it's quite possible you may overwrite some of the files you are trying to recover. When you deleted the files, windows would have made the area of the drive where they are located available to be overwritten.

Not necessarily immediately, but eventually.

To avoid that it's always desirable to recover to another drive, or another partition on the same drive, or if you only have one drive with no partitions, then recover to a USB thumb drive.

If you have a lot of files to recover, you might befit from my recent experience of recovering some music files.

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=23991

You can try recovering any files, although some may be intact and some sadly not.

You can't do any harm whatsoever recovering files. You're just copying them from one location to another.

Good luck, but post back if you need more info.

I guess I should have told you what my problem was, I had a virus and on my compaq it had a recovery. So when I startedmy computer at the DOS window I seleted the F10 button and that started a system recovery, I thought it was like a windows fix and when I restarted everything would be still in place. But I lost all my execute files and images, including address book and mesages. I see all my list of programs in the file but I cant excute them.

I also read the link you posted about your music. Well that would not work for me because I must have a 75 gig of images and data files in about 5,000 plus files 150gig in total lost files. So if I cant use my hard drive I'm lost. If I reinstall my Corel Draw will I beable to find my images I created in that file format?

Yea, that's a completely different problem to the one I thought you had.

I have a Compaq Presario, and there are two types of System Recovery available. A "Normal Recovery" which is supposed to leave all your personal data intact, and a "Destructive Recovery", which is as dramatic as it sounds. It wipes everything.

My experience is the normal recovery can also wipe personal data, so if you actually selected this option, it seems it didn't do you any favours.

I personally don't have an answer to your problem, and I wouldn't like to guess as that wouldn't help, but there are a couple of guys on here who may be able to give you something more positive, but if you do have to use your PC, you'll probably be overwriting files every time you do.

Good luck, and I hope you can get some positive input for your situation.