StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Well, it was time to give my computer a brain wipe and start anew, as the thing hadn't been cleaned since we booted the factory installed OS. So, thinking I knew what I was doing, I slipped the windows disk into the drive and booted from that little coaster, selecting the drive to be reformatted and installed, bam.

Windows finishes installing itself and reboots to go into it's actual Setup mode. Except for the minor detail of the version of windows I thought I just nuked shows up. The drive I ACTUALLY nuked was the drive with.. you know.. all of my important, backed up data from computers long past that I don't have a spare copy of.

So aside from being an eternal idiot, I've gone on a quest for data recovery software. Except that all the free stuff doesn't find shit, and all the programs that DO find my stuff seeme to cost in excess of fifty bucks, sometimes three times that.

Does anyone know of free, effective data recovery that can look past a Quick NTFS format?

I hate to be the one to say this, but if you got through the setup till it reboots then it's copy'd some stuff onto the drive as well as formatting it, which makes recovery that much harder. (And some stuff you won't get back)

That said, that absolute best piece of recovery software I've ever used was O&O Diskrecovery , sure it's expensive. But it gets'er done. So might be worth obtaining through less official channels (though should be bought if you can afford it, since it really is a great program). As for freeware? Everything I have tried is rubbish, unfortunately. Maybe there is some new open source ones that are good. Try sourceforge and freshmeat.net.