Can anyone please help me. I was reformatting my computer and I have an external hard drive attached and the computer must have thought that it was the D drive and completely erased everything. Please tell me there is some way of recovering it. I am not holding out hope, but I can't bare to think that all my files are gone.

Make yourself a UBCD4WIN and use some of the NTFS Undelete utilities on it.

I hasten to tell you the obvious: do not use the drive until the exact moment you're ready to start recovering files.

If all you did was format the drive, then there's a good chance you can get your data back. Whatever you do, though, do not write anything to that drive.

Phil

P.S. Will be back with more info later.

Try Pheonix Data Recovery !

I will recover definitly !...

What actually happen, and I have no clue how, was the when I went to reformat and reinstall windows xp it did it on my external hard drive. It made two drives and wrote a copy of windows on one 16 GB drive and just erased the rest of the other 134 GB and wrote a few files. Thank for the advice I will try them now.

Edited May 11, 200818 yr by cleary71

Every program I use only gives me the files that are currently on there, not the ones that are lost.

you need to do a full sector scan of the disk to discover files and folders since the file allocation table is destroyed.

Try Recuva (freeware), which in the latest build added "Deep Scan" (Options>Advanced) support for recovering files from formatted drives.

http://www.recuva.com/

If that does not work try R-Studio, its not free but it hasnt failed me yet.

http://www.r-studio.com/

just give a try to Phoenix data recovery tool....

I managed to erase an external HDD myself not long ago, and I've used GetDataBack to restore the files. I managed to restore almost everything (you need another HDD to restore the files to, you cannot restore files to the deleted HDD).

This is not a free program, but you can download a trial version here:

http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm

When recovering data I use RecoverSoft Data Rescue PC V2.0. It's a free download from the website.

http://www.recoversoft.com/download.htm

The only thing is the scanner part is free. If you want to recover anything you have to purchase a license. The free scanner works great, it can scan for folders or or by sectors. It even has a preview feature so you can view word docs. etc. before having to purchase the software. I highly recommend it, easy and works great!