Recovered Data Not Working

Send an email to Verizon telling them you have some vital information on your computer that pertains to President Obama and national security.

The NSA will show up and recover your data for you.

What did I tell you?

"YOU MUST TAKE IT TO A PROFESSIONAL DATA RECOVERY CENTER.

You cannot do this yourself."

You didn't listen to me, did you?

Since you have errors / trash in the files which you think you recovered, this means your recovery was NOT successful.

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.

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 ".