Even after six or seven
obnoxious confirmation messages, I sometimes delete things I wanted to keep.
Damn.
For this reason, I have kept MWUNDEL.exe on a floppy through numerous OS changes (Windows 3.1, Windows 3.11, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT). This little program (along with the all-important MWUNDEL.hlp and some random .dll) enabled me to always retrieve my "unretrievably" deleted files.
Just open it up and have it search the directory where your deleted file doesn't exist. There it will be:
?OCTORALTHESIS.DOC Condition: GOOD
Thank you, MWUNDEL.exe.
But the saga continues...
I got Windows XP this weekend. Naturally, I immediately went to test out my old pal, MWUNDEL.exe. (I had been liking XP up until this point.) I double clicked the friendly paper-jumping-out-of-the-garbage-can icon (now slightly pixelized due to increased icon resolution over the years), and, to my horror, I recieved an equally friendly XP-style error message:
This application has tried to access the hard drive directly.
As I am an anal-retentive operating system, I will not allow this.
Now, the second part of that is
paraphrased a bit, but it actually did tell me I couldn't run it because it was trying to access the hard drive directly.
What the hell?
Since that incident, I have changed every XP option from "Windows XP style" to "Classic style". Maybe eventually I can look at those bubbly corners again, but the wounds are too fresh right now. XP and I are spending some time apart.
...but I will always have a place in my heart for MWUNDEL.exe and its related .dll file.