Big10:
I used a program called File Scavenger.
I tried Norton utilities, but that product is so damn confusing and I don't think that any of the tools it has are capable of fixing a formatted drive. Searches indicate they had an Unformat utility, but that apparently only worked on Fat32 partitions, not NTFS.
Then I searched the web for recovery tools and tried lots of them... But none of those I tried which advertised that they could recover data even from formatted drives actually worked. Lots of them would happily find the new partition and allow me to recover deleted files, but they could not find files created before the format.
Then I found File Scavenger, and that allowed me to search for "defunct data", and that basically scanned the hard disk surface and found all the executables, jpegs, avis, etc that had gone missing. Though I think many of the filenames were unrecoverable.
I don't know if any of those tools wedoe has listed work or not... Most tools you have to pay for to recover anything. File SCanever allowed me to recover files smaller than 64K so I was able to see that it could recover a few jpegs, and the price was only $40, so it was a bargain.
I used a program called File Scavenger.
I tried Norton utilities, but that product is so damn confusing and I don't think that any of the tools it has are capable of fixing a formatted drive. Searches indicate they had an Unformat utility, but that apparently only worked on Fat32 partitions, not NTFS.
Then I searched the web for recovery tools and tried lots of them... But none of those I tried which advertised that they could recover data even from formatted drives actually worked. Lots of them would happily find the new partition and allow me to recover deleted files, but they could not find files created before the format.
Then I found File Scavenger, and that allowed me to search for "defunct data", and that basically scanned the hard disk surface and found all the executables, jpegs, avis, etc that had gone missing. Though I think many of the filenames were unrecoverable.
I don't know if any of those tools wedoe has listed work or not... Most tools you have to pay for to recover anything. File SCanever allowed me to recover files smaller than 64K so I was able to see that it could recover a few jpegs, and the price was only $40, so it was a bargain.