Data Recovery of a Formatted Drive

[COKEDUDEUSF]

Could I please have some recommendations for Data Recovery of a Formatted Drive. There are so many choices out there that I don't know which one I wanna use.

[jaclaz]

Choosing a program (once decided if going "Freeware" or "Commercial") and actual probabilities of getting back the needed data depends by a couple of factors:

• HOW the drive was formatted "before" (which filesystem) AND IF the filesystem was defragmented recently
  
• HOW the drive has been formatted "after"
  

General ideas are exposed here:

Just as an example, if a drive was NTFS and has been re-formatted as FAT32, chances are that you can recover 100%.

The actual Operating System used to format may (please read as "will") make the difference.

If the drive was FORMATted as "Full" under Vista/7, probabilities are 0% (zero percent) as under these OS the Format command actually WIPEs the filesystem:

jaclaz

[COKEDUDEUSF]

It was using XP when I formatted it and it is still using XP now.

[Kelsenellenelvian]

#1 STOP USING IT!!! (They told me that here )

Any use of it overwrites the old data.

[jcarle]

If you formatted the drive AND installed a new copy of XP on top of it, you can pretty much kiss your data goodbye.