I was reading on a website that it is possible to recover data from a reformatted hard drive even after a new OS has been installed. I have a friend who reformatted his hard drive and lost all of his first childs baby pics by accident and would like to get them back. He ran a dell restore disk that reformatted and reinstalled. He didn't know that it would reformat. How can you recover data from a hard drive that has been reformatted?

First, your friend should have backed up anything of value because a virus can also delete stuff. To rescue data (that has not been over writen) you can use the free programs.... Disk Investigator http://www.theabsolute.net/sware/dskinv.html latest version v1.3 - FREEWARE - (Only 0.5 Mb) Discover all that is hidden on your hard disk (for Win95, Win98, WinME, WinNT, Win2000, WinXP) What is Disk Investigator? - Disk Investigator helps you to discover all that is hidden on your computer hard disk. It can also help you to recover lost data. Display the true drive contents by bypassing the operating system and directly reading the raw drive sectors. View and search raw directories, files, clusters, and system sectors. Verify the effectiveness of file and disk wiping programs. Undelete previously deleted files. and... http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP In order to display the HTML help files on WINDOWS 95, you need to download and install the "HTML HELP SUPPORT" from the MICROSOFT Web-site. This is already included in WINDOWS 98/ME/NT/2000/XP Under Windows XP you will have to have Administrator rights, so that all logical drives will be displayed to you. PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x is freeware. By freeware is meant programs that can be obtained, used and distributed free of charge. PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x is a data recovery software tool that is made available free of charge. Please note that you may only use the software if you agree to the following license conditions. CONVAR does not provide any support for PC INSPECTOR File Recovery 3.x. PC INSPECTOR File Recovery is a data recovery program that supports the FAT 12/16/32 and NTFS file systems. The current version 3.x replaces the previous version 2.x, which is now over 6 years old. Here are some of the new features in PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3.x Finds partitions automatically, even if the boot sector or FAT has been erased or damaged (does not work with the NTFS file system) Recovers files with the original time and date stamp Supports the saving of recovered files on network drives Recovers files, even when a header entry is no longer available. Competition products cannot recover such files. The "Special Recovery Function" supports the following disk formats: ARJ AVI BMP CDR DOC DXF DBF XLS EXE GIF HLP HTML HTM JPG LZH MID MOV MP3 PDF PNG RTF TAR TIF WAV ZIP HOW TO USE After starting the program, you should first select the desired language. A menu will then appear in which you can select from three different reconstruction methods. On the next page you can chose one of three reconstruction possibilities. The program includes an extensive html help Please note that PC INSPECTOR File Recovery 3.x cannot reconstruct files from data carriers that are mechanically or electronically damaged. You should only use data recovery software if you are very confident in the use of your PC. If your hard disk or other data carrier has a mechanical or electronic defect or you do not feel confident in the use of data recovery software, we suggest that you contact a data recovery company such as "CONVAR - The Recovery Team". http://www.convar.com/ Don't use the PC in the mean time, but practice with these two programs on another PC. Since the OS will be stored at the start of the hard drive, it's likely that the pictures will not yet be over written. Once the pics are over written, you are stuffed. The police and expensive companies claim to recover data, even if it's been over written. Post back with your results as I have only used PC Inspector, but that worked great on a damaged floppy disk.

In addition to "don't use the PC in the meantime" - make sure you run the program from a floppy or cdrom. To find one of the above mentioned services, do a google search for "data recovery service." If you live in a major metro area, you can also check the phone book.

Recovering data after a format is a piece of cake, with the right software. However, the reinstall of windows has `probably' made the recovery of the pics very doubtful. But anyway, Ontrack's 'Easy Recovery Pro' (http://www.ontrack.com) and PowerQuest's 'Lost and Found' (http://www.powerquest.com) are excellent.

I dont know anything about "Disk Investigator" or "PC INSPECTOR™ File Recovery 3" but for example "PowerQuest's 'Lost and Found" would not work with drives over 9Gig! Good data recovery software does not come cheap or Free, if you really need those files you lost, use ByteBack Data Recovery Software, It does magic!!! http://www.toolsthatwork.com/byteback.htm http://www.toolsthatwork.com/byteback.htm

Thanks for all the replys. I am going to try some of these out and see what happens. Thank you all for your responses.