Re-installed windows xp over old windows xp

[PraxxtorCruel]

Had a virus which caused a lot of issues. It cleaned my desktop of all icons, hid away all my shortcuts in the start button, would not let me start task manager, so technically I couldn't do anything. Managed to get rid of it with kapersky running it through the usb flash drive. Although even after all that, the problems listed above are still persistent. So what I did was re-install xp over the old one wiping out the old system32 folder. My old data still seems to be in the hard drive as the free space is literally the same, but how would I go about retrieving it? I tried going to my computer and looking at the windows folder but there's nothing there.

Thanks

 

[Dano]

Chances are the virus just turned all your files hidden attibute to on, if you set the system to show hidden files and folders they should magically appear.

 

[PraxxtorCruel]

Chances are the virus just turned all your files hidden attibute to on, if you set the system to show hidden files and folders they should magically appear.

Ah poo, you were right. Well better transfer all this data into my usbs' and wipe the hard drive clean and re-install a fresh copy.