Data Recovery Procedure

The most reliable method of data recovery is to first backup your data. If you never backed you your data before loosing it accept the idea that your data may be forever lost. Now contact a data recovery specialist. Bring your checkbook.

My comment to most everyone with a PC or other computer unit is to back up as often as you wish to not re-inter all of the data.

During installation, hard disk is formatted. If format was full and not a fast format (not default, you must specifically ask for the latter at install prompt), just forget the whole thing. And don't worry, sooner or later you 'd loose the data anyway since you don't backup. S.M.

I make no claims or guarantee's but this might work....

http://hetmanrecovery.com/

I played Russian roulette for 17 years by not backing up my data. Result: 12 crashed computers and 13 dead hard disks.

They were sitting here for years, until I discovered easeUS software and got all the data back. The software works well but it took weeks. The next problem now is that everything I recovered is a challenge to find it back on a 1T hard drive, because the program puts it all in coded directories. The pics, docs and drawings are pretty easy to find since the .jpg, dwg. dxf. doc, docx is very distinctive.

The software is not for free, so I paid about $80.00 but is is worth it.

If the data "value" is very high, a professional data recovery service is your best option.

If this is your own personal data and you cannot afford the high cost of a professional data recovery service, you could "try" ddrescue.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/manual/ddrescue_manual.html

WARNING: ANYTHING you do can result in permanent data loss. Be prepared for a worst case result.

My friend's laptop drive recently began to fail (S.M.A.R.T. warnings) and Windoze would not boot. Drive had many bad sectors with more failing every time the drive was used. Her local tech service expert said he was unable to recover any files and declared the drive a total loss. A new hard drive was installed and OS reloaded. I advised her to send me the old drive so I could try ddrescue from my Linux system. Fortunately ddrescue was able to recover and copy over 10 GB of personal and work related files to a flash drive. About 10% of the original data was corrupt or lost, but she was very happy to get the remaining 90% back.

I used to backup (dd clone) my entire HDD every few months and alway advise friends to save often and backup regularly. None of them follow that advice. I now only backup personal data because a fresh Linux OS (+Applications) install is actually faster than a full disk clone.

Remember the 3 most important rules for data safety.
1) Backup!
2) Backup!!
3) Backup!!!

If this topic is still relevant, then this guide on deleted items recovery, I believe that it will be helpful to you in many ways. If you have some questions on how to use this guide, feel free to dm me, and I'll help you out.

Send an FOIA request to the NSA. They should have it somewhere in their vaults.

//////Hand slapping against forehead///////////

Hey dude.. ummm... you should..Ummm ..like.... UMMM... REALLY... Ummm.... back up your hard drive thingy ...BEFORE...Ummmm.. installing...Ummm ANY.. Operating system ..Mannnn.

Peace Brother..

//////Hand slapping against forehead/////////// AGAIN!!!!

Windows uses disk space for scratch pad, virtual memory, and other system utility storage ( all of which is hidden to the user ).

It is not guaranteed that you will recover anything useful even if you undelete immediately, and in your case practically impossible, since reloading windows uses disk space to uncompress the files it installs, and marks everything else as available space.

Windows marks file names as deleted without actually removing the data; however any subsequent action by windows or a system process that requires space on the drive may overwrite the area in question, since the system sees it as unused.

Because files are not necessarily contiguous in storage, you may find trash anywhere in the volume of the file you are interested in.

I have not heard of anyone recovering files overwritten in this fashion, without MANY MANY dollars worth of attention, and even those people will tell you up front that they do not guarantee 100% results.

GOOD LUCK- take what you can get, repair what you can repair, and bury the rest under the tombstone " Lesson Learned ".

Is the formatted data stored on boot drive or other partitions? If the data were originally stored on non-bootdrive, then there is hope of recovery.

Please do not store more files on the partition where your files stored originally in case overwritting.

Then you can download and install a data recovery tool to recover the files. Please do not save and install the tool on the original file storing partition.

I'm using this windows file recovery tool.

Recovery experts do not always need to have physical access to the damaged hardware. When the lost data can be recovered by software techniques, they can often perform the recovery using remote access software over the Internet, LAN or other connection to the physical location of the damaged media.

Regards,
Caleb