Recover Lost Data From Formatted Hard Disk

Hathor_ wrote: »

NO, I don't have any backups.

Any real solutions? Please..

You'll be lucky to get anything off the drive. Once the data is written over - it's, well... Gone!

Or you could try this: http://www.recuva.com/ it's from the guys that make ccleaner. Or you could try these: http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm

Then there's:

Hirens Boot CD
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

Ultimate Boot CD
http://www.ubcd4win.com/downloads.htm

Get Data Back is quite good too of course and there's a 'portable' version out there too if you google for it.

HTH

crampo wrote: »

Not 100% True, If you used a program to delibertly Write over your data then yes you have a little/no chance what so ever to get it back, where as if you have formatted it using Windows Xp/Vista Built in tools on installation/Explorer. you can recover almost/everything. I recommend GetDataBack. I Have used it on many HDD over the years, i have had a couple that were on there last legs and still managed to get all the data that was stored on it , off and onto a new HDD. I even did a test couple of HDD's where i had a old HDD with old unwanted data, i formatted it and installed windows 5 times , and still managed to recover everything. So just shows how easy it is to do.

Now you know how services like for instance the police can recover data from HDD's.

I can also state categorically that all of this is true. I've had a similar experience, though I hit my drives with MaxTools which supposedly 'zero filled' the drives. I had a disk of 'recovery tools' that I've added too over the years, but never got around to using.

So when I purchased some 1TB drives recentl I setup a laptop and a couple of caddys with a bunch of old ide drives which were recovering to the sata drive.

I can't tell you how impressed I was, I recovered stuff from the zero filled drive dating back to 1995 even my Temporary Internet files from MSIE :rotfl:. It had been formatted using various tools over the years too, not including various windows installs but yet I still retrieved TV shows I had encoded from vhs off that thing that I thought I had lost for ever!

I had a drive I think it was 450MB from an old laptop, I was absolutely amazed to find that it recovered the contents of that too. But GDB isn't free, but I agree it's worth it, as is Steve Gibsons SpinRite which I also used and Ontracks Utilities all of which exceeded my expectations, but I found it better to set the laptop up and let it recover from one drive to another, it helped being able to leave the programs to do their job without me wanting to use the computer.

If I had only one computer, then I think I might have gone with Ontracks Suite, this is only really as it was the only one that allowed me to half recover somthing, then leave off save it and carry on where I left off a feature I only discovered by poking around the software wondering what everything did. I got that from some covermount some years ago, but it's a good tool if you can get hold of it.