Help need on windows 7 computer.

[maksim]

My name is maksim and this is the first time i am posting question in forums. I am using windows 7 computer which has 250 gb hard drive in it. hard drive has 4 partitions C, D, E and F. Partition C has operating system installed in it which i dont use as told by my friend. The remaining dives are used to save my data. Drive D has important data which is only used by me which has my documents, seminars and projects. Last night one of my cousin (11 years boy) was playing on computer. He was using all options by clicking right click button on mouse. I had gone to have lunch donno what he has done and formatted the entire D drive on my windows 7 computer. The data stored on that drive is really important and i need them daily. I wanted to know what is the procedure to get back the entire drive data?

[phinds]

My name is maksim and this is the first time i am posting question in forums. I am using windows 7 computer which has 250 gb hard drive in it. hard drive has 4 partitions C, D, E and F. Partition C has operating system installed in it which i dont use as told by my friend. The remaining dives are used to save my data. Drive D has important data which is only used by me which has my documents, seminars and projects. Last night one of my cousin (11 years boy) was playing on computer. He was using all options by clicking right click button on mouse. I had gone to have lunch donno what he has done and formatted the entire D drive on my windows 7 computer. The data stored on that drive is really important and i need them daily. I wanted to know what is the procedure to get back the entire drive data?

Depends on the type of formatting done. A quick format just overwrites the pointers to the data but does not overwrite the data itself but a full format overwrites the data as well. If it was a "quick format" then you can pay a professional service to get the data back and it shouldn't cost you too much. If it was a full format, the data MIGHT be retrievable but it would be very expensive to have it done.

[rcgldr]

On older versions of windows a full format just did a read scan of a partition in order to update a list of bad sectors. I don't know if a full format on current versions actually overwrites the entire partition.

Assuming that most of your data isn't overwritten, it's probably fragmented which may make it difficult to recover. If you wanted to use a data recovery program, you would probably want to buy another hard drive to use for data recovery, and the recovery process could be more complicated than what the recovery program can accomplish. So as suggested, you may be better off using a data recovery company, but that can be expensive.

[Routaran]

re-enforcing what phinds and rc said. in most cases you will end up having to send the drive in to a recovery specialist and unfortunately, it will be expensive

there are a few tools that may work but i wouldnt be too optimistic, you could give them a try. keep in mind that as you do stuff on the HDD you will fragment the data further thus making files that much harder to recover.

you might try
http://www.piriform.com/recuva
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

i havent used these programs myself but found them on a google search. cant garauntee that this will work.


for the future, i would suggest setting up separate Administrator and User(Limited) accounts and for normal computer use, be logged into the user account. This will prevent anyone from making a system wide change like formatting a drive without the appropriate passwords. It prevents a lot of user errors that have the potential to break the system.