Hard Drive Problems - Please Help

[Dj_]

I have recently formatted my hard drive and was wondering if there is anyway of getting any of the files back, there was something on there I should have kept

 

[AMV]

if you are running that drive now.... stop first thing you do is stop, shutdown, unplug the drive until you have a plan of action.

ok, now that that's out of the way, what filesystem was on the drive... if it was NTFS you could easily be out of luck, but if it was FAT32 I know that it's easier to recover, but if you have reinstalled anything over that harddrive you have a 50/50 chance that you didn't write over the space the old data was.

to start trying to recover, search google for unformat, and undelete (the latter being much easier to do) you will get alot of demo and trial program hits, but if it's only a little data you want to get back some of these will do it for you, and at the very least some of these will even tell you whether it can or not. if one can find your files, and tells you that they are still there, then you know that you have a chance, but if you grab like 5 different trial prgrams and none get close to finding your file.... SOL

if a program finds the file, then you have to go and find a free tool to help you recover your data, there are a few, but I haven't seen one lately that comes to mind (sorry) or you have to research data recovery on your own and work towards doing the repair yourself, which can be interesting, but time consuming.

sorry I am not more helpful, but these are the steps I followed (more or less) when I lost my partition information on a data drive, not as severe a problem, but it taught me a few things about data recovery and value. oh and by the way, don't perform any action on the drive till you know what you are doing and you are sure you are doing a positive thing (I changed my partition ID 4 to 10 times trying to get the right one... not pretty)