My Windows 2000 computer detected a severe virus and I was afraid that my entire computer would crash so I panicked and stupidly deleted the entire administrative user account without thinking about my files nor backing them up. I was more concerned with my installed expensive software being affected. Now that I successfully removed the virus on my other user account and am able to use all my software. I am trying to recover my lost files now. I am not sure what to do. Please advise.

another way but more tiresome but can be efective is to get a program (there are a lot of free ones or a linux disk) that can boot from CD and then look directly at the hard drive. If you do this you may see in the index entries that start with a question mark '?'. these are entries that the computer thinks have been deleted (such as your user account documents etc) but they can be recovered if they have not been written over. To do this you will need to copy those files and then rename them removing the '?' mark.
M

I just went on http://www.piriform.com/recuva and you can only download if I pay for it.

click on one of the links by the red check mark

guess this one will work:
slave your hdd to another computer and get your file. I am thinking that your files are not actually deleted after you've deleted the account.

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