I've seen several posts about software to recover files after the hard drive has been formatted. I've looked at several of those offerings. I found another one, "Hard Drive Mechanic" from Higher Ground Software Inc. (www.highergroundsoftware.com/index.htm). This one sounded very good. I'm looking for guidance on the best alternative for my situation. What happened was that I let the support group replace WinNT with Win95. Before doing the OS install, they said they copied the needed data files off to a server directory for later restore. When they had restored everything they had several Lotus Notes databases were missing. They said it was bad sectors on my disk. I'm suspicious that they missed one or more of the data directories I needed. So, I'm hoping that even after the install of a new OS, those DBs might still be retrievable. Thanks for guidance on this!

big difference between a formated drive where the fats have just been wiped but the data is still there vs overwritten like what happens with a install. You can try. Excuse of bad sectors is why the dbs weren't there is not valid. And why replace a 32bit OS with a old 16bit OS with no security is beyond me. Bad choice. Biggest thing you want to do is have the system shutdown until you are ready to try a recovery. Every write to the hard drive [like just booting up] means you lose one more cluster of information by being overwritten.

Thanks, Wanderer. I know about the dimishing returns. I held off booting up until I just had to get something off that machine. Thanks for your confirmation about the "bad sectors" rationale. I was very suspicious of that. As for the OS selected, that was a tactical move. Going backward to 95 puts my machine higher on the refresh list for a replacement. Still looking for guidance on any of the many possible SW options. "Hard Drive Mechanic" from Higher Ground Software Inc. looked very promising. Does anyone have any experience with it? Thanks!

Good plan on getting a replacement! I backup or duplicate data so I haven't lost anything in a while so I haven't had to use disk restore software in a long time. Hopefully someone can advise you. Good luck!