A friend of mine has had her lifes work lost on her laptop.

AFAIK she's used some discs to re-format the hard-drive.

In the event of a re-formatted Hard-drive is it possible for a PC guru to sift through the HDD and find data still on it?

Or is it goodnight vienna to all her hard work?

If it is a simple reformt of the disk there are many programs availeble on the internet that can restore the date. Advice not to write on that disk.

But if you don't know what you are doing yo might want to go to a computer shop. Should not be coslty, as it is a very simple thing to do. (Even I can do it).

Edit:

believe you can free download a program called pci-filerecovery. Should do the trick for most files.

It depends on the reformat. I've had success recovering most but not all information on a reformatted hard drive using a program EasyRecovery Pro. I'm sure there are more up to date programs to the version I have out there that will do the same.

If nothing else has been done (reused) most data should be recoverable from a normal format - but you mention discs being used so not sure what she may have done - she may have re-written over that data in a long process using those discs and that would remove much chance of practical recovery. At best it is an expensive/long process.

She has no back up source at all?

Most hard disk recovery programs can unformat a hard disk. They can also undelete individual files or even recover from a repartitioning.

The main factor is what has been done to the drive since the data was lost.

If it was previously formatted with FAT 32 rather than NTFS it is easier, but still possible with NTFS

The important thing is DO NOT USE THE DISK FOR ANYTHING until you run the recovery.

Most tools will want to recover the files to another new disk rather than write over the existing disk, which may mean removing the disk from the laptop and installing it in another machine.

If in doubt I would recommend getting an expert to do it as without the correct tools you can do more harm than good and ruin the chance of expert recovery.

Good luck.

Edit

The free download of this tool will examine the disk and tell you what can be recovered, but you have to buy it if you wish to perform the recovery

60USD is not a lot for your lifes work

Edited December 31, 200916 yr by thaimite

Data Recovery Wizard Professional

It is very risky to leave everything sitting on one hard drive, external hard drives are so cheap now. The data recovery business is probably booming. So many things can go wrong, hard drives do fail, people do wipe them (my brother inlaw who is accountant did it and lost huge amounts of very important data), computers do get stolen etc, etc,