SPCR

After rashly deciding to reinstall windows to deal with a bunch of problems, 1 being no sound, another being not being able to "log off", I lost a doc that i had been working on for a while.

Before the install i copied the contents of C to an external drive. I even remember seeing the particular file on the ext. But afterwords I cant find it.

Is there any way at all that i can restore the C drive to how it was 2 days ago, before the reinstall?
Or just get the 1 file back somehow?

thanks

The only chance is to try to recover the deleted file, and a good free software to try with is Recuva. If you can, stop using that system any further and connect the harddrive to another system. Then scan it with Recuva to see what if can restore. The more a drive is used the more area of the drive will be written to a second time, ruining the chances of recovering a deleted file from those sectors. You could also scan the external drive you mentioned the same way, in case it had the document on it at some point.

i attached an image of a file search. It finds a temp shortcut version of the file i am looking for, but i cant access it.
Is there any way to get it from there?

I ram Recuva and it didn't find the file on C or the external

When i try opening i get the following msg:

The drive or network connection that the shortcut 'e-----Assignment3.LNK' refers to is unavailable. Make sure that the disk is properly inserted or the network resource is available, and then try again.

It looks like you copied the shortcut to the file from the picture, you want to search for "*.docx" without the quotes if its word 2007/2010.
You may also want to check how to recover a lost word document http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316951