I NEED SOME HELP PLEASE!!!

[cbarr2]

I have a Lenovo laptop with Windows XP on it. 

When I got on my user tonight, my documents weren't there.  I had to go through c drive and go the long way to my documents.  But it's only with my user.  I'm a computer administrator and I don't get it.  It happened once with my brother, but it was fine once we restarted the machine.

I've been writing a book with WordPerfect X3.  I had finished with it sometime last week while I was out on the road and I emailed it to myself once I got to a hotel with internet access.  Now when I opened up the document tonight, it was there but it was missing like half of the book.  It wasn't like someone deleted half of it.  It was missing critical details that  spent the past month putting in there.  I checked my email as well and the version I emailed myself was only half way, along with the version I sent my sister though I emailed her the book today.  HOWEVER, I opened up the document this morning and it was the full thing.  It only did this with that one document.  It also wasn't in the right order from "modified documents."  It's acting like I haven't saved it in months, but I have and it's only doing it with this one document.

I'm sure that I'm not mistaking the document names.  It's like the document went back in time to about a month ago.  I don't understand it.  It's only with that document.  And I don't get how my email attachment is different either. 

Someone please tell me what I have to do to get it back to normal.  And if someone could tell me why I have to go the long way to get to my user alone, that would also be great.

I worked so hard completing this novel.  Please help me get it back.

[dahlarbear]

1.  Backup Data.  Aside from the "failed" email copies, you haven't mentioned any "valid" off computer backup copies.  Suggest you backup any "data" you need to save "off computer" and then try to sort this out.

With such weirdness, you need a "safe" backup before you start mucking with system diagnostic and/or recovery.  Seriously, first backup whatever you have, correct or not.

And you should avoid "writing" to the hard drive, as those writes may overwrite the data you're trying to recover if the system believes those disk clusters are available for reuse.

Burn the data to CD/DVD, an external USB (thumb/flash/hard) drive , or "slave" the hard drive to a working computer system (so you can just read from disk and not write to it).  The last option though is "risky" if you don't know what you're doing.

[patio]

Hopefully this will help...