recovering files after a format

admiralofthefleet

probably a silly question but i had to format my computer and send it away to be repaired after a hardware problem, the thing is, i did 4 formats and could see my files in each one, i thought that everything was completely deleted when one did a format, so im wondering, when i get it back is there ANY way i can recover the files that were on the hard drive, couldnt do a backup because of the problem i was having and would really like to get some of the stuff (music, etc) back.
thanks

aidan_walsh

How did you format the drive? How many partitions were on it?

After 4 formats, I would pretty much say forget about them. Formatting rebuilds the file system on the disk, so everything gets overwritten.

dlco

A site worth a visit; if nothing else it will get you thinking.

http://www.runtime.org/recoverability.htm

Archytas

You might get the info back using some recovery software. Touch and go though as some of the software out there isn't great. There are some alright camera utilities that are meant to get info back from removable cards and camera storage. I used one before - the process took forever but I got most of the important stuff back.

@Aidan - Don't basic formatting tools just change the switch on the sector to say "empty"(and thus overwritable) but the data is still there? I'm pretty sure you have to physically overwrite every sector to really format the drive to be nothing. But I could be wrong?

conical

The following free software worked for me before. File names are mostly lost, but has saved my bacon in the past

-C

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm