recover data from reformatted hard drive

  As my windows xp acting slow as a snail, i intend to reinstall windows
to the

drive C(only windows files stored on it). I also have drive D and
drive E used

for store my personal data. But before reinstallment i reformatted the
whole

hard disk by mistake. The problem is: i did not back up drive D and E.
So the

data were gone.
i downloaded free data recovery software from software website but it
didn't

work. Should i turn to other unfree software or take my hard disk to

professional data recovery company? Anyone has suggetion on it?
Thanks!!!

 macy wrote:

It depends on how important your data is and how much money you wish to
spend.

I would forget free data recovery software, stop using the drive and
think about spending money on data recovery.

  wrote:


If you haven't reinstalled windows then the following can help:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

If you have, the following undelete utility has worked well for me,
even finding files on a formatted drive:

http://www.undelete-plus.com/

It runs a little slow...but it works a treat, and I found it more
user-friendly than a some other undelete utilities I tried.

Regards,



--
Stephen Howard - Woodwind repairs & period restorations
www.shwoodwind.co.uk
Emails to: showardshwoodwindcouk

 

If you deleted *all* partitions...
then recreated all as one partition...
then formatted it and installed XP, you have no chance of getting the data
back.

 On Tue, 22 Jan 2008 23:54:55 -0800 (PST), macy


Describe what you did to the drive prior to reformatting the
whole thing by mistake.  There were 3 partitions so did you
delete the primary partition and the extended partition(s)
then create a new partition spanning the entire drive, that
shows up as the capacity of the whole drive?

To you the answer is obvious but I am not clear on how you
could have accidentally formatted different partitions and
also formatted C.




How much is the data worth in money?  Sending your drive to
a professional data recovery center is the most likely to
succeed in recovering some (possibly even all if you haven't
reinstalled windows yet, haven't written to the drive again
yet besides making one new partition) files, but tends to
cost a few thousand dollars.

Where is this drive now, how are you accessing it?  I
suggest it should be in another system booting and running
from a different drive, unless you did not delete and then
recreate the partition and only installed windows to the
first partition again.  IF the same old partition sizes
remain, AND windows is on the first partition and nothing is
written to the other two, it is possible the other two could
be recovered from booting to that windows installation to
run recovery software - but I recommend against doing that
because it is possible windows will write to the other
partitions, if they've been formatted then windows considers
them fair game to write to without your telling it to do so.

What recovery software have you tried so far?
You might try one or more of the following, I think some of
them have free trial versions with which they will at least
show what files they find, or maybe even recover a few of
them just not all of them until you buy the full version of
the software.  A Google search will find their respective
websites.

FinalData 2 or EasyRecovery

one that is completely free that you might try first is
PC Inspector's File Recovery 4,
http://www.pcinspector.de/Sites/file_recovery/info.htm?language=1