Can I recover documents after formatting my hard drive?

[Curious6]

This is probably a hopeless attempt, but still, it's worth trying. I had some very important documents on my computer, but it completely crashed and I was forced to format it, as everything I tried didn't work. Anyways, the question is - silly as it may seem - is there any way of recuperating documents that were formatted?

 

[dduardo]

Your out of luck now considering your probably using the computer. You should have tried a knoppix liveCD before formatting. There may be a way to recover your files, but it is slim to none.

 

[Curious6]

What would the way be to recover the files? If someone has a slightest idea of what to do, please post it!

 

[dduardo]

I guess you could use something like this:

http://www.recovermyfiles.com/

 

[Curious6]

Thank you very much for suggesting that programme!

 

[PerennialII]

you can try a number of freeware/shareware software to do the job, start from a archive like www.snapfiles.com and give them a go. Personally, the experience I've had is that after formatting the amount of data you can extract goes down quite a bit, easier to get a high % of stuff out from "simply" damaged drives. I'd recommend if the data is important that you try at least a couple of software, for some reason in some instances some seem to work better than others .

 

[Lyuokdea]

The best program out there is GetDataBack NTFS and FAT32 editions, if you are running windows.

Steps:

First, stop using your computer immediately and shut it down.

Take out the hard drive and install it as a slave on another computer with GetDataBack installed.

Run the Program and if the data wasn't directly overwritten when the OS was reinstalled (which is actually fairly likely, because if you reinstalled the same OS it likes to install on the same parts of the HD as your old one, and thus, not where your documents are.

The data can then be recovered onto the computer you are using to get data off of the HD.

The problem with this approach is that GetDataBack runs about $80. But it's well worth it if you really need some of the data on there. Or of course, cough cough, cough.. uh hem. Anyway, I've used the program sucessfully in a situation very similar to yours (parent's forgot about some of the necessary data until after the reformat :) and it worked perfectly)

~Lyuokdea

 

[LostButFound]

I would like to pour invaluable experience.
I lost my data some year back which has dreaded me like nighmare. It took me about 10 days to get back my data. Researched on some few good data recovery software (got it on google). Tried every demo but Stellar Phoenix FAT & NTFS http://www.stellarinfo.com" came out as winner. What I simply did, download the demo version, intall the software, made my infected hard drive as a slave and started the scan process. Scan took about 3 hours but what saw through the scan all my data recovered, marked as deleted. Result was shown in tree structure form which make my task easier to navigate throug my data. I got one more option to save my scan result which I can use to save my data aftet getting the full version. Thus saving the time and effort which may have wasted once again.

I would highly recommend those who are looking for really good data recovery software can trust on this piece of utility.
Can Download the demo from: http://www.stellarinfo.com/partition-recovery.htm