I have a hard disk that had been running XP Pro and I accidentaly mixed it up with an empty disk, reformatted it, and installed Windows XP over. But I now realize I had tons of important information on it, and aside from kicking myself for my stupidity, I'd like to recover the files, if at all possible. What software would be recommended to start with? something that can read from a reformatted disk, but that isn't too expensive -- even freeware, if there is such a robust free product -- with a decent chance of recovery. The files were NTFS, with simple Admin security permissions, not EFS encryption. I reformatted the drive with quick format, not regular. Most of the files i need were in the Documents&Settings>Username>MyDocuments folder, so I don't know if that would have any effect on the recovery. Does windows automatically write these default folders to the same or a similar physical location on the disk, and if so, does that lessen my chances of recovery?

I had the same problem only a while ago, and it was driving me crazy. But thanks to faulty.lee I was able to get all my files back. Because you have re-installed Windows back onto the same hard drive, you may have overwritten files that you need (in the C:\Documents and Settings\Username\My Docs folder).

I think that windows would write the 'basic' my document files back to the same place on the hard drive - but it only writes minimal files (my music, pictures folders) so you might still be able to get back the files in those folders.

The program that got me out of my problems was Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional. Send me a PM and I can give you a link to the program! Its pretty simple to use, but if you need help, just ask. Also, when your recovering files, copy them to another disk (external hard drive, second hard drive, network share) as so that the 'recovered' files aren't written to the place where you are recovering from!

You can get Ontrack Easy Recovery Professional at:

http://www.ontrackdatarecovery.com/file-recovery-software/

The biggest problem I see here is that you installed Windows in the same partition/drive already. This will most likely be the data killer as it will write in different areas in the hard drive and I have no doubt that it touched the area where your previous data was.

If that Ontrack program doesn't have much success, you can search on Google for file recovery or even partition recovery and see if you can use any of the other programs to recover your data successfully.

I used the Ontrack program (thanks, Jimmy) and was able to recover around 60% of my stuff. The other pieces wouldn't read as anything intelligible. I did try another one afterwards, just to see if i could squeeze any more recovered files out of the disk, and File Scavenger actually worked pretty nicely, getting me another 20% of the data. So I ended up losing a bit, but not too much. Thanks!

its good to know that you got some (most) of your data back! Getting around 80% of your data from a formatted disk with windows reinstalled over it is very good!
-jimmy

i tried using those recovery softwares before but it only shows me millions of filenames that i didnt even know. sad thing in loosing data from formatting is that it would take a lot of time and most of the time, recovered documents are even destroyed or needs to do some editing. how much data size are we talking about here? i used Getdataback.. i forgot the like, just google it; it recovered like 50% and a lot of editing with the document...