I went to run typed in delete c: and deleted my hard drive now have no icons or start bar how do I fix this .?

Its a Dell computer.

I went to run typed in delete c: and deleted my hard drive now have no icons or start bar how do I fix this .?
STOP!!!!! Don't do anything else on that computer.





First you need to decide if there is information on that computer you want to save? If no then go ahead and put the CD that came with your Dell in and it will walk you through setting up your computer again.





If you do want to save the information on your computer then anything else you do on that computer right now could permanently erase your data. You're lucky because in this case deleting doesn't necessarily mean your data is gone.





Since it's a dell, I recommend you call them and tell them your harddrive crashed. They will send you a new harddrive as part of your support aggreement with them. If you don't have an agreement, I'll describe that below.





When the new drive comes, Dell will ask you to send back the old one. Before you do this, install the new one using the instructions they give you and then install the windows software using the CDs that came with your computer.





Good so far, I hope so. Now you need to go on the internet and buy a file restoring program. I've used the one from www.recovermyfiles.com but there are a lot of them out there. Install that software. A lot of those programs let you download a trial version. The trial version will first tell you if it can help you, and then if you want to use it you have to buy it.





Okay, now for the first hard part. You need to hook your old harddrive up to your computer as a second harddrive or a slave. There are a lot of resources on the web that will give you step by step instructions on how to do this. Hopefully your hardware isn't too old, because that can complicate things sometimes.





Now you ready. Start up your computer, it should find the second harddrive. If it asks you if it can format that drive tell it no. Start up the file recovery program and tell it to scan that drive. Depending on how bit the drive is it may take many hours. After the scan it will tell you what it can recover. Recover whatever is important to you, and then send the old drive back to Dell. If you don't have a dell support contract go to the store and buy a new harddrive. Now you have two.





There are a lot of different ways to do this, but this will give you an overview. Depending on how savvy you are you can search around for free ways to do this but they require a lot of work.





Good luck.


brian
Reply:Why would you type in "delete c:"? What did you think would happen? Report It

Reply:re install windows, what u have done is wiped of ur harddrive... with everything else then the files were in use at tle time...
Reply:You really don't know anything about computer don't you? OK, now you just restart the computer and the icon and starbar would gone forever unless you reinstall windows.
Reply:Well, you hosed your computer. Use the disks that came with the system to do a complete reinstall. All the info you had is probably toast. If you want to try and retrieve the info, call a tech guy for help.
Reply:you must use "BOOT Disk" for run yor pc and reformat it.
Reply:If you are at all computer savvy you need to complete re install your operating system and all software you had. You should have disks for this.





Otherwise you should call a PC technician to do this for you.