I had windows professional installed and it went all wrong so i used the recovery cds that came with the computer. It formatted everything which is a disaster i managed to put most of my stuff back from my dvd backup. The only thing missing is a very important .exe file about 1mb in size. Is there anyfree software that can read my deleted partition and get this back. Thank you for your help in advance. Dec Home Built Amd Athlon 64 FX-51 +3200 1024MB RAM 400GB Hard Disks

You can extract from your memory. There are programs in which you can run to do so. I am new to computers, but I think what you want might be at http://www.oehelp.com/DBXpress/default.aspx Good luck Sandi

If you restored the computer with a recovery disk there is every chance that the file has been overwritten on the disk during the process. The chances of it still being in memory is nil. The recovery disk will have deleted the existing partition and recreated it using the same space. You could try some recovery software but I wouldn't hold out much hope. These recovery disk can be quite destructive. Stuart

The best way to recover something after it's been deleted is to make sure you do nothing with the hard drive (don't create new files, don't defrag, etc.) The recovery cd's probably destroyed the file. Even if it didn't, writing to the hard drive (restoring files from your dvd copy) probably did. 1MB is alot (for a EXE file)...there's a good chance at least part of it was destroyed. I'm not sure if there's any free software that would be able to delve deep into the hard drive. There's an entire industry of data restoration, and they have techniques such as opening the hard drive and physically reading it, etc.

I second gbone. It's not cheap to utilize the industry of data restoration. The cost can be $500 and upward. i_XpUser

Try the commercial on this page " runtime.org " it works. at least it will tell you if the file is there and able to get back.

Read this: http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/35921.html