how do i recover data from reformatted hard drive?

[hotpotato71]

uh, i need help again. i upgraded a colleague's os from win98 to winxp today because he's been complaining that his pc keeps hanging. before i set up xp, i backed up his important files to another pc on our office network (running winxp pro). the xp install went okay, but when i tried to retrieve the files from the networked pc, i can't find them anymore. i just have 2 questions:

1. have there been problems on file transfer between win98 and winxp pc's? i noticed that in our office network, the win98 pc's can 'see' the xp machines, but the xp machines can't 'see' those running win98.

2. can i still recover files from the reformatted pc, the one i upgraded? it was fat32 before but now it's ntfs. i plan to use pc inspector version 4 on the affected machine.

sorry for the bother. i'm still sore at myself for being such a klutz.

[Ahcoraj]

Try Getdataback http://www.runtime.org/ or Restorer 2000 pro http://www.b******.net/r2k.shtml both have demo versions that will show you what you can recover. Then it's up to you to decide if it's worth purchasing it to retrieve the data that hasnt been overwritten. Did you go to the PC that supposedly had the backup and do a search by date and or time that you created them, perhaps they are there and you're just missing them...... Good Luck!, let us know how you make out....

[shamus]

I've had luck with this freebie:

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

[Shard92]

just remember when trying to recover.... if the harddrive you are trying to recover is the boot drive or the home of your swap file you risk your deleted data every time you boot up. AND do not install the recovery software on the drive to have data recovered or you may overwrite it. you are best off if you put the hard drive to be recovered into another machine as a second drive and recover that way. As far as programs I've had good success with getdataback but have never used it to recover a fat32 drive that has been reformatted to ntfs. I have also heard good things about pcinspector but have never used it ( I already had a license for getdataback.... ) note getdataback has two versions.. one for fat and one for ntfs.

Good luck

[hotpotato71]

thanks guys! i tried the pcinspector freeware, it managed to recover many of the files. sad to say, some of the files were corrupted, but i guess more than 50% isn't bad. i'll know on monday if the files that were restored are the important ones. thanks again!

[bonson]

IMHO you can use Easeus DataRecoveryWizard recovery tool to restore erased data. It never failed be before, cause it's recover methods are awesome. Really great tool.