My HP Pavilion g7 laptop running a probably five year old version of XAMPP had its hard drive malfunction and it had to be replaced. Obviously this destroyed all installed programs, but files should have been retrievable. The shop tech found my files in the standard user folders in the old hard drive, but every trace of my personal files and folders was gone from the /xampp folder. It was as if there was a fresh installation of XAMPP that had completely deleted and replaced what was there. She had never heard of XAMPP and didn't touch anything but the user folders on the old hard drive. I didn't think to check while I was there for "last modified" dates, and have no way to access my old hard drive at home. My last backup to external hard drive appears to have failed, and I have lost a lot of work.
Does anybody have an idea how this could have happened, and if there is any chance of recovery of any part of it?