I recently took a hard disk drive from my old pc and installed it in a spare pc, I wiped the HDD clean, formatted NTFS and reinstall win xp, all ok........
my wife has just asked for a file, which was of course was on the old machine !!
I'm now well and truley in the dog house or worse............is there anyway I can retrieve this file , ( I don't beleive I can ) anyone had a similar experience ?
can anyone recommend software that may fix this ?

any advice welcome , thank you in advance

If you did in fact wipe the drive then reformat .
You are SOL.

I have done the same thing myself.
Strange how they never need that file when you ask if they have anything on the drive they want saved.
But after the job is done they come up with lists of files they want.
Most are stored in the wrong folders or areas of the drive.

Good lesson to learn here.
Store data files on a second hard drive

SOL? yep dommed, those dammed files had sat there for a year or more, lesson learned some on another medium dvd?

SOL = $#&^ out of Luck :(

Backup, Backup and Don't forget to backup
Before doing anything

OK Thanks Rick, back up a well hard earned lesson.....(ITS ) in the S...
uk version

Regards, john

There are utilities that can recover this sort of thing - whether it is possible in this case depends on whether the actual sectors have been re-used in the new install.

Check out some of this stuff listed on ZDnet to see if there is anything there - if it doesn't work then you've lost nothing. If it does, you can gloat :D

http://downloads-zdnet.com.com/3150-2248-0.html

I wiped the HDD clean Is the most relevant phrase. How was this done? If zeros or patterns were written to ALL OF THE DRIVE then only the CIA would have any hope of recovering such data. If the wipe was a "quick wipe" which is sometimes only done to track0 or to the first and last megabyte of the drive then the file might well still be there unless it got overwritten by the reinstallation files/formatting; particularlly since FAT and NTFS start off by saving the data and metadata to different areas of the hard drive.

Check the drive out with GetDataBack from www.runtime.org. I would start with the FAT version since the original files were FAT but also try the NTFS version if that didnt find the file.

If GDB doenst find the file they I doubt if other utilities will. Using it may also indicate whether the drive was truly wiped or not since if it was properly wiped it should not detect any previously patchily overwritten files. GDB is free to recover stuff with as long as you only do it one file at a time, which shouldnt be a problem for you.

SOL = Sadly Outta Luck (polite form)

I suggest you use DataRecoveryWizard. [spam link removed by mods]

Alfred - if you and davidkahn (from the same address by some strange "coincidence") just want to come here and advertise (without prior approval from the owner) then your links will be removed and you will be banned.