Re: FN-FORUM: Data recovery - is there any chance at all??

date posted 14th May 2004 16:03

> Before I consign myself to an afternoon of stiff gins, can anyone tell
> me if there's any possible chance at all of recovering data when the
> hard drive's been reformatted, a new OS installed and the PC used for
> a month?

If you are willing to pay enough for it, yes. I understand that it is
technically possible to recover data that has been over-written up to 5
times. But not easy or cheap. (This is why tools to really wipe a
hard disk have to make multiple passes with lots of random data.)

Other than that...
One basic check is how much of the disk is now full. If the disk is
using the FAT filesystem then these tend to fill up from the "bottom".
If your data was at the "top" of the disk it may still be there. More
advanced filesystems (NTFS) tend to scatter files around so that they
can be read more quickly, so the chances of your data being in one piece
are smaller.

Worth a go with the utilities others have suggested - you might recover
some of your files.

Good luck

Martin