on the subject of file recovery. when one is finished with the hard drive, - then smash it to pieces, as everything is on the disc somewhere
watso bought a new usb drive, and ran a file recovery program over the drive - and there were a lot of files on the drive (mostly photos). the sister and brother in law gave an old computer to watso's mother to play with - but she could not be bothered, and gave it to watso.. as watso plays around with computers mmmm - watso ran a file recovery program over the hard drive and ........ - best never give a computer and a hard drive away.
as has been mentioned on this thread, the file is still on the computer - all that has happened is that the file association has been changed.
one idea might be to copy the contents of the hard drive to a partition in an external hard usb drive - and run a file recovery program over the partition, and save to another partition of the drive
