But my bet is it's gone except for what you backup.
1. If you format a drive and then use it as I read in your post, then you made the choice to overwrite what's there. Such will not come back.
2. Some think a drive contents vanish if the links or Start Menu items vanish. A wide skill level of people come here, so tell if you can create new menu items called "shortcuts." Since such is in the Start, Help and Support, I leave how to create such to that.
3. As most learn the hard way, hard disks are temporary storage. You keep what you can't lose on your choice of write-protected storage. CD-R counts as well as many other media.
4. Read your post. There's just not enough information there to see what happened to the drive. Or if it's just menu items or truly you don't see the files with DOS or Explorer.
5. About System Restore. This will NOT bring back your files. It never had such a feature, but it is fragile and fails for many reasons. I will paste in a passage that is for the most part unedited but contains many links and notes about SR.
Bob
--------------------------------------------------------
I know the frustration about System Restore. You'll read thread after thread about this FRAGILE feature of Windows ME. The following is a collection of notes about fixing System Restore and what might interfere with System Restore (SR.)
To people trying to surf safely, firewall software such as Zone Alarm has stopped restore points from being created. If you've added such recently, disable such and see if the restore points are working again. Report this to the vendors/makers/authors so they will fix it.
Let's cover a few items?
1. The September 8, 2001 patch.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;q290700">
MS KB Q 290700 - "Checkpoints That You Create After September 8,2001 Do Not Restore Your Computer"
2. A rather LENGTHY article with many links and more articles on fixing System Restore.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;q306768"> Troubleshooting System Restore in Windows Millennium Edition
The information in this article applies to: Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
This article was previously published under Q306768
3. How to use the SCANREG /RESTORE in Windows ME
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/install/trouble/INDEX.HTM"> Look down the page here
4. PARASITES. These can no longer be tolerated. Let me state that your antivirus does not detect/remove all PARASITES! I consider SPYWARE, ADWARE, VIRUS and TROJANS to be lumped into a category I call parasites. Symantec has yet to WAKE UP! to the spyware/adware parasite issue.
a. Adaware 6 from http://www.lavasoftusa.com">http://www.lavasoftusa.com or
b. Spybot from http://security.kolla.de/">http://security.kolla.de/
c. An online scan from http://housecall.trendmicro.com/">http://housecall.trendmicro.com/
5. The new menace. KAZAA borne virus. A big uptick over the last month of machines showed up with KAZAA and some trojan/virus that I think was brought in with KAZAA. The upshot of all this work was to remove the PARASITES, along with KAZAA and hope the machine would stabilize (most did.) A few were quite damaged so the OS was reinstalled.
My problem may be some sort of virus, I was not formating the drive or anything like that, I just sat down at the computer got a low memory warning on the c drive and discovered that the d drive was empty.
Thanks for the speedy reply.
Rick

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