i was formatting the six computers in my basment for clean install and donation/selling. i had gotten through formatting them all when i remembered that i had had crucial data on one of them. how can i recover this data after i have already formatted? i dont want to spend a butt load of money for some recovery program. is there some other solution. Never try to teach a hog to sing. It frustrates you and aggravates the hog.

if it is that important forensics labs wil help you. my teacher (he looked it up on the web) did the same thing and sent it to a lab in alabama the returned the files not in any glorious way but he had all of his files back the no glorious part was because he had to search thru all of the files to get the ones he wanted

It's either expensive or no, it can't be done. Pick an answer. You can avoid many of these Windows problems with Linux. Linspire eases the transition for new users

I've been hoping someone would post their experience with the free data recovery software. There is a "butt load" of them if you do a Google search. It'd be a shame to use bad software when you are trying to recover data and make things worse. That must be why data recovery is so expensive.

I guess the only way to find out for ourselves is by formating one of our old HD and test those free data recovery software. Unfortunately I don't have any spare HD laying around. i_XpUser

Was the drive partitioned fat16 or fat32? If they're older systems they may be fat16 and can unformatted with the old dos 'unformat' command. Fat32 is much more difficult. Run fdisk, option 4 to check the partitioning if you're not sure.

If FAT16 can be unformatted and FAT32 is more difficult, where does NTFS stand? i_XpUser