Recover inaccessible or lost files due to Windows upgrade

At times, while trying to upgrade your current Windows operating system to a newer version, the system encounters problems. During this process, after the initial verification process, the system stops the installation process and all the data in the hard drive becomes completely inaccessible. There are several possible reasons behind this problem, which can be resolved with certain recommended solutions. However, if those suggestions fail to solve the problem, you can use any file recovery software to recover the seemingly lost or inaccessible data back.

In the above situations, the system fails to respond with several error messages on the screen. One of the mostly encountered error messages, while upgrading Windows 2000 to Windows XP can be read as below:

“Setup was unable to verify drive C:
Your computer may not have enough memory to examine the drive, or your Windows XP CD may contain some corrupted files.
To continue, press Enter.”

At the occurrence of the above error message, when you press the 'Enter' key, another error message is displayed as below:

“Setup cannot access the CD containing the Windows XP installation files.”

Possible reasons behind the above problem:

• The BIOS settings are incompatible with the new OS, Windows XP.
• The Windows XP setup disc may have damaged
• The hard disk may be corrupt.
• The motherboard does not support Windows XP.

Below are some of the suggested workarounds for the above listed causes behind the problem:

• If your current BIOS version is incompatible with Windows XP, then verify and upgrade the version. You can use the Microsoft Windows Upgrade Advisor tool to verify and download the recent BIOS versions. Similarly, from there, you can get all the motherboard compatibility information.
• If the Windows setup disc has the problem, try to clean the CD with any soft cloth and cross check the disc by running it on another system. If, the disc does not run, try using another disc.
• If your hard disk has any corruption, then boot the system in Recovery Console and run the 'chkdsk' utility to scan the disk for errors. Moreover, if you find any corruption to the Master Boot Record (MBR), run the utilities, 'fixboot' and 'fixmbr' to repair the same.

However, after trying all the above options if the system still remains inaccessible, then you need to take the help of any reliable file recovery utility.

Software that can recover lost or formatted files back from your Windows system

Image by Artform Canada via Flickr

These days, computers have been a necessity. The business class or working users store their important official data in the computer hard drives, while the home users use their computer hard drive storage to store their personal data. In this way, computer memory store many important data, including text documents, photos, songs, movies, audios, videos and many such files/folders. As the Windows operating system is being used by the most number of computer users in the world, these operating-system based computers are hugely targeted by various viruses/malwares. Though, users take steps to safe-guard their valuable data in the drives, sometimes, it becomes practically impossible to prevent the infection/corruption. In such situations, you can take the help of any file recovery software to recover your data back.


There are several situations, which corrupt important system files and make all the data in the drive completely inaccessible. Many users encounter such issues after installing a new software. After installing a device software that has probably come with your camera or any such device, when you restart the system, the system fails to boot and displays error messages on the screen. In such situation, the error message that you receive can be read as below:

“Stop: c0000218 {Registry File Failure} The registry cannot load the hive (file): \SystemRoot\System32\Config\SOFTWARE or its log or alternate”


The above error message indicates that the system registry file, which stores all the options and configuration settings of the Windows OS, has been damaged or corrupted.


In order to solve the above problem, you need to perform a set of systematic steps. First of all, you need to copy the system registry files from their original location to a newly created temporary folder. You to create a general set of registry files and place them at the location. These new registry files will help you boot the system. However, these files do not have any information, before the change and you need to restore the registry by performing 'System Restore'. This resolution process is quite confusing and can be performed only by the advanced users. Hence, it is suggested to format and restore the data from any valid backup.


However, if you do not have any valid backup, then you need to recover the lost, formatted or inaccessible files with the help of any file recovery software. These data recovery software are designed with highly innovative techniques to retrieve lost/inaccessible files and restore them back, with their original internal structure intact.