Please Help if possible... I was tricked into re-installing Windows XP by the "tech support" at Gateway (what a joke). They assured me that my data would still be there after the install, but, of course, it is not. So I'm wondering if anybody knows of any tools out there that could possibly recover files on my hard-drive. Any other suggestions? Please help. Thanks, Michelle

You could try a trial of Active@Undelete or Ontrack. If the files have been written over by the re-install. your chances decline very fast. data recovery can possibly find some, if not most, but a a high expense. Active@Undelete is cheap and may work. try the trials to see if they find anything worthwhile before giving any money.

That depends, did you use a stand-alone OS CD, or did you use the Gateway recovery software. If you used there software, it's designed to format the hard drive, deleting all of the data that was loaded, then it will reload the operating system and preloaded software stored on the system, there are utilities are there that are able to recover erased data, but more than likely since it was re-installed with factory default settings and OS, it's a strong possibility that it overwrote the "hidden" data. You can also refer to this post, found here at computing.net http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/18579.html

I had helped a friend with a Gateway before and one of Gateway's recovery cd is a standalone XP disk, I believe the other two contains drivers and applications respectively. Maybe there was a break in communication somewhere, but if you did a repair install which maybe what you was supposed to do. There should not have been any data loss. You can use Runtime Software's GETDATABACK "FAT32" or GETDATABACK For NTFS to recover the lost data.