Re-formated without backing data up. Help please!

[Potatocodone]

So my friend jump the gun and reformated without bringing the laptop to me to back up his data.

He somehow screw up the Toshiba recovery and it won't boot properly (some corrupted windows error. I believe the laptop lost all battery power while installing Windows Vista).

I am hoping you guys can help me out in recovering his data before the partial reformat.

I am not sure how far it got into Windows installation but any help will be greatly appreciated.

 

[sub.mesa]

So what were you doing, installing Vista or reformatting the drive, or both? What happened to your drive?

If you did a long format and overwritten it with zeroes; all your data is gone forever. If you did a quick format it overwrote the first 20MB and you have to use NTFS recovery utilities that can work without drive letter and detect raw disks. One such program is @Active File Recovery. But it's commercial like many Windows recovery utilities. Your data should still be recoverable in this case.

Also consider buying an external 2TB drive for backups; without a backup you should assume the data can be lost at any moment and is not important at all. Many people threat their data this way, but actually they would badly need a backup to protect their data. With current pricing so low, i hope that you consider a proper backup setup after this incident.