accidental formatted my hard disk

[nklee]

any1 can provide me freeware to recover back my data????

my hard disk is FAT32 windowsXP

[gamehead200]

Please do not post in more than one forum. Other topics have been removed.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

you can try http://www.recuva.com/ but ive never used it when the whole drive has been formatted and ive only used it on NTFS partitions

http://runtime.org/products.htm has some non freeware that might help

why are you running FAT32 anyways? when you reinstall, you should go with NTFS unless your dual booting to an OS that wont do NTFS

[nitroshift]

I'd recommend you R-Studio but it's not free. Still, it's a great piece of software (just ask Digerati Prime). I use it quite often and it has never let me down as I managed to recover a couple of files after 2 formats.

[jaclaz]

If you "just" formatted an hard disk, you DO NOT need a "file recovery" program, what you need is (more simply) a "partition recovery" program, i.e. TESTDISK:

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

ony IF it does not work, for any reason, you will need to use a "file oriented" approach.

jaclaz

[DonDamm]

jaclz is right. First, check out restoring the partition before you start file-based recovery. Unless you did a complete format that wiped your data, then you basically reset the partition table so your computer sees all that space as free. There are a number of partition utilities out there and don't discount paid software. There are many programs which will function fully in trial mode (BootIt NG, as an example) and allow you to recover the partition. I'd take a look at Acronis' Disk Director. Years ago their earlier Disk Editor saved my butt when I lost an entire partition that windows just wanted to format. I was able to find the second copy of the file table and replace the one at the front of hte disk and was able to get all of my files. I'm still using that same disk today with no changes since then!