I'll do this in dot point form to save the essay. *Laptop crashed 5 months ago. (at which point could not even load up past a certain point) *Just got new external hard-drive 1TB. *Was able to 'successfully' back-up everything, then a simple factory restore. (was more of a blind backup, as I couldn't see the files, just selected which types I wanted to back up) -Oh keynote, this was all operating under a windows VISTA home edition. *Computer finally restored itself to factory settings, re-plugged the external hard-drive back in, to find that there was only a small icon (2.7mb) which is supposed to assist in restoring. No luck there had a C++ error of somesort which basically said 'this is terminating in an unusual way'.. *Managed to seek some help from few mates who are KINDA into computers, and they managed to show me how to make it so all hidden files were visible, at which point I could see an additional icon in this folder. The first was one I mentioned earlier was a '.exe'... This new one I found was '.fbw' and the file size is a lot more accurate, it's 290,000,000mb roughly. (290gb) I've tried 2 shit house programs in attempt to recover my files as I've lost A LOT of important stuff to me, including photos and film of my sons birth. I really just want these items back, the worst part is being able to see that they are there, in some shape or form, just not being able to access them. Please help with your idea's on how I can retrieve my things from this .fbw file. I've tried MULTIPLE ways, including changing the amount of 0's, fidling with a bunch of small applications, and too much reading, spent nearly 3 days in a row doing this and I'm at the point of stress where my eye is constantly twitching, could someone please help me. Thank you very much. Jake. (I've tried unpacking these files on laptop-vista and pc-xp, neither worked) Included are some pictures of errors I've encountered. Recovery Manager - (program used to also backup files originally) Hp Backup Fixer -
You might benefit from this link http://www.ehow.com/how_5187620_restore-fbw-files.html Also supposedly, from reading this on a blog, you can get that .exe file going by deleting the log files in System Recovery folder in your C:\ drive, not sure how reliable of information that is though, because this is where your system restores are I believe.