i havent seen many of them, thats a new one too me, unless you made a new partition on the drive and kept the old data on a different partition?
i wouldnt know much about these sofwares, i get a bit suspicious of them but its always worth a try =)

if you google around you may find companies that can retrieve data from a hard drive

but it aint cheap

I've tried recover my files too. They offer a free download that will tell you what can be found on the hd, but actually retrieving the data means buying the program.

hmmm it kinda sounds too good to be true. lol. but if the files are really important, worth the short hmm?

i just keep my computer partitioned neatly so that in case of emergencies, i can copy those files off to another USB drive or HDD easily. i don't have extra huge HDDs to set to RAID arrays and i personally don't use any special softwares.

well, i've had past instances where i forgot where some stuff are and forgot to back them up. so for me my partitioning is very important. up till now it's working fine. lol.

It might be worth it to give these guys a call to see if there is any hope:

http://www.aerodr.com/

Aero Data Recovery, Inc.
213 E. Main
Alhambra, IL 62001
Phone: (866) 728-3328

I decided to do the work again. It's only documents and pic. I am lazy so I wanted to get it the easy way. thanks for the info though.

good idea, like the thinking and it saves you money as well =)
but i had a think, how can they do that? surely the data disappears, like when a PC is formatted and you look at the disc size, like mine is 160Gb, and when i looked at it when i reformatted it was 157GB (3Gb for windows & copied files etc.) so i was thinking if its not there how do they get it back?
confused =S

not exactly sure, however i remember back when i was a kid, i was told that only by deleting a drive totally and all do you clean all info. format doest really clean the slate. no idea tho.

how can they do that?

As I said earlier, it takes forensic analysis. It is important to remember how a HD stores data. There are microscopic magnetic particles embedded in the disk platters. When data is saved on the disk, those particles are aligned in patterns relating to 1s and 0s. During a normal format, data on the disk is not removed, the tables pointing to the data segments are changed - most of data is still there, there is just nothing pointing to it - the space is reported to the operating system as free space.

But even in a full format where all the disk sectors are formated again, not every single particle is changed, there are "residual" magnetic traces of the old data remaining that can be read by very sophisticated equipment. Often, this is done by disassembling the drive and analyzing the individual platters inside the disk.

From a security standpoint, these residual traces of old data can be a significant security risk if those disks get into the wrong hands. For this reason, there are "Wipe" utilities. These utilities do nothing but write a series of 1s and 0s over and over again many times, thus reducing the residual magnetism of the critical data to the point where nothing is salvageable.

For the normal user, after a format and fresh install of the operating system and applications, as data is written to a disk sector, in effect every time the magnetic read/write head writes (changes orientation of the particles), old residual magnetism becomes weaker and weaker. Saving new data to a formatted disk, in effect, does the same thing as wipe, just not as thorough. But over time, as files are saved, changed, moved, etc., the affect becomes the same as a wipe.

@Kaistar - actually, delete is even less secure as that ONLY changes the tables so the space is marked as free. The actual data is not touched at all. In fact, since a single file is saved in many sectors with mapping data to the next and previous sectors, all Undelete utilities do is go back to the tables and reestablish the links to the deleted files first sector location. But again, if you delete a file, the more you use the disk to save new data, the greater the chances that "free space" will be used, thus overwriting the old data.