lost everything on my hd!

[Mike]

Hey everyone i am an idiot i was rushing through
reinstalling win xp and i clicked on fresh install and it
wiped the whole hd.
i have personal stuff on that drive thats been passed from
hd to hd dated by over 5 years ago.
i was just wondering if their was anyway of uninstalling
the new win xp and recovering the old sys.
if not what choises do i have in recovering this
information?
I was told i might be able to imaige the hd to view the
erased files?
or is their any other method out their for a person thats
in the same situation as me?
i didn't change the file sys conf. its still fat32 like it
was b4 this all happen.
thank you to anyone reading this and please help me.
Mike

 

[purplehaz]

If you did a format then the data is essentially gone. There are companies
that recover data from damaged harddrives, not sure if they can after a
format, I would think so, but it's usually very expensive(hundreds of
dollars). Search goggle for harddrive data recovery. Here's one:
http://www.drivesavers.com/

 

[R. McCarty]

Since you have re-used the formatted drive, any data that
overwrote the locations from the previous format are likely
gone. However, I have had some success with programs
from Active Eraser. They offer both a Partition recovery &
UnEraser program. You level of success is not very good,
but these programs do an excellent job of recovering lost
data & or partitions.
http://www.uneraser.com/undelete.htm
The Key thing now, is not to use the PC as any additional
writes to the drive will make recovery less likely.