Well, my computer had some weird problem, and so I had NO idea how to fix it so I decided to pop in my WinXP cd in. I don't know what the heck I did, I think I reformatted...I thought I reformatted without deleting any files..ok well let me get to my point, when I got my windows back up, it turned out that I had reformatted EVERYTHING. Call me a computer whiz. But is there any possible way of restoring those lost files?

Formatting erases the HDD. If you would have simply stopped after formatting, you would have a much better chance of recovering your files. Now that you've reinstalled XP, it's possible that some data has been written over. Try searching google for file recovery software...or maybe someone else will recommend what to try Asus A7N8X-X 1800+ @ 8 x 210MHz 768MB PC3200 Asus A9550 128MB/128-bit Gamer Edition WinME/WinXP Pro

Try the orange ad banner to the top right of this page, GetDataBack (FAT/NTFS) works pretty good even on a formatted hard disk. Do not type anything in this space.

to elaborate, when you reformat, it does not actually delete/remove data from the hard disc, what it does is erases the 'index' if you can call it that, so that it looks like there is nothing there and giving permission for that space to be used again. So installing windows may well have been put on the space that some of your data was on. So if say you had 20gb of data and installed windows which say uses 1gb (not exact) then you may have 19gb of your data left, but its not quite as simple as that because depending how fragmented your data was (how scattered around the disc the data was), windows might have used disc space relating to a small portion of every file you had on there.

Try this download it will let you see if you can restore the formatted data . http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file_download.asp?fid=6769&fileidx=1

Sorry on this site, file is called lost and found http://www.pcworld.com/index/0,00.asp