Quote:
Originally posted by KRL
Most people think formatting wipes your drive completely clean. This is not true unless you are using one of the ultra powerful data deletion programs designed to totally eliminate every trace of data on a hard drive.
There are programs out there that can still read the data. Your directories will most likely be a bit fucked up, but individual files have a good chance of recovery.
There are also labs you can send it to also that charge about $1000 and up to recover data.
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As expected KRL has it right. Those labs he talks about are expensive, so what's your data worth? $1K is the starting price as I recall,
The point is with effort you can recover most of your data depending on what type of format and if you have done anything to the drive that would affect the directory and file access tables in addition to the data itself.
Point is, you're in for a software rebuild. Drop a new harddrive in for that and make your data recovery a seperate project.
I have used a number of recovery programs. They work for the most part and there is typically something to clean up or fix. Restoring a whole working PC is a wet dream at this point I suspect. Best hope is if you did zero to that hard drive after the format and that was a quick format.