computer whizzes

cool good lookin out.

Since you reformatted the computer, you're going to need a heavy duty app to recover that data. More than likely, reformatting also overwrote your FAT table, this is where your OS keeps track of where files are/were. If that is overwritten, then a typical undelete app has no 'starting point' to recover the information. You'll need something a little more heavy duty that'll be able to analyze the raw contents of the file.

Get a CD burner and always back things up!!

damn viruses.

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Originally Posted by benagain

When you delete something it flags it as deleted so when you check my computer you see you have X ammount of disk space left (even though the data is still there). It'll stay there till you save something in that space. Once you do, it's gone for good.

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Ah. See, I knew about how data just lies around still there, but I thought somehow it could be recovered even after having been written over, and I was wondering how the hell that's possible. :rolleyes:

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Big Calhoun

Since you reformatted the computer, you're going to need a heavy duty app to recover that data. More than likely, reformatting also overwrote your FAT table, this is where your OS keeps track of where files are/were. If that is overwritten, then a typical undelete app has no 'starting point' to recover the information. You'll need something a little more heavy duty that'll be able to analyze the raw contents of the file.

Get a CD burner and always back things up!!

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Yeah, but that's only for FAT filesystems, right? For example, I use ReiserFS which uses a completely different algorithm to keep track of all the files/directories.