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I was having Windows vista earlier and apparently it was running very slow and I purchased new Windows 7 professional and formatted the C drive and loaded the new OS, I copied most of the files but forgot to back up a folder in C drive which had major work related files.

Now I want that folder back with most of the files.

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2 Answers 2

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Sorry, it's gone. If you formatted the drive and did a whole OS install, the chances for recovery are extremely thin. There has been a lot of stuff written to the disk. No, I'd say the chances are almost zero. Sorry.

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  • Not always correct. You can spend a lot of money for OnTrack to try to recover it. That will be hundreds of dollars or more - the value of the files may be high enough to justify that.
    – mfinni
    Jun 21, 2010 at 14:42
  • Dennis, thanks for your updates! But no way you say?
    – Jay
    Jun 21, 2010 at 14:48
  • Dennis is probably correct. I made the point that, if the value of the data is high enough, you can engage an expensive professional service to try to help. @Maxwellb below has some good advice as well.
    – mfinni
    Jun 21, 2010 at 15:13
  • Forensic software such as that mentioned in maxwellb's answer or foremost may be able to find a few parts of a few files. Some data might be recovered by looking at the magnetic shadows of previously written data. It is controversial whether this is even possible. Further reading: Data Recovery and Gutmann Method
    – Dennis Williamson
    Jun 21, 2010 at 15:42
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First: Create a drive image of your C: drive NOW. Use a USB loaded distribution like SLAX to back this image up to an external hard drive, for example. This will assist any data recovery operations later. The more you use the drive now, the smaller the chance becomes that you can recover ANYTHING.

Next: Try TestDisk, and its program PhotoRec, which searches for various files (images, plain text, word docs, zips) by looking at file headers. Run from within a new folder on a drive with a lot of free space. Point PhotoRec at your image file, and recover files to the new folder. It will create several recovery directories, which may contain anything from your work files to garbage from your Web browser cache.

Then: Wait. Or run in the background.

If you hadn't formatted the C: drive, the TestDisk program from the testdisk suite has an undelete option, which does reasonably well at recovering recently deleted files from NTFS, and FAT32 drives, at least.

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