need help vista to 7 problem

[rob2000]

my friend decided for whatever reason he wanted 7 on his laptop that runs vista. he made a restore point after reading something suggesting thats all he needed to do. he installed it as a upgrade and it hung up on the installation and he could not get it to run at all. he made another windows 7 disk and it installed 7 fine now. but his laptop has 2 partitions from the factory. i forgot the sizes, but basically vista and all his personal files were on one, and 7 was installed to the other. ive not seen his machine personally so this is all second hand until he has a day off for me to try to help him. im no expert. Anyway he wants his music and pictures back, he says he can see the folders but when he goes into them they are empty, are the files just hidden or did they get nerfed? I read something about windows easy transfer tool (migwiz) thats on the 7 dvd do u think this will solve his trouble or are his files gone for good. i know one person that repairs puters for a living but i figured id try before i make him pay for it to be fixed. thanks in advance to anyone that offers help.

his machine is a HP pavillion dv9000 , i dont have any other specs than that at the moment.

 

[bigdogchris]

Sounds like he installed one of the OSes on the restore partition, which is a bad thing.

Tell him to check for windows.old folder in 7 c:\windows.old

He may also be looking at the user folders for the current OS that he's on.

 

[rob2000]

thanks for the response, somehow he was able to get the files by buying some program and a external hard drive. so its fixed. guess he is gonna wipe vista out and just install 7 now. i tried to tell him to hard backup his important stuff in more than one spot to rule out another catastrophe. maybe he will listen. I never did get to look at it, but its fixed so thats all that mattered.