The best way to try and recover would be to take the drive out, connect to a different computer as a slave drive and try to run the recover utility.

Dave

As Dave said. When my laptop disk just would not start the Windoz OS, I pulled it and made it a slave drive and got everything off.

A format doesn't mean you lost the data, you can format a drive, several times, and still recover data. Format utilities and fdisk programs do not gurantee (AT ALL!) that data will be made unobtainable. Several companies have written extremely sophisticated software that can read old data from a drive that has been formatted and written over. You can even read data off a hard drive that has physically crashed, ie, the heads skipped on the tracks and "crashed". Some firms even go so far as to take apart the drive, physically, and then they have ways of recovering data.*1

Don't let a format scare you Len, the data is still there (maybe not all of it) and is more than likely recoverable.

For a fee, of course.

*I know people are going to disagree, but I'll leave the research up to you and google. However, this is a good read
http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/tech/talks/garfinkel.pdf

Also, there was a story on Slashdot.org a few years back (2? 3?) about some college kids who purchased used hard drives that had been formatted and recovered large amounts of sensitive data off them. The slashdot story may or may not be about the gentleman in the story whose link I provided, I cannot recall.

1: With a "zero" format, or low-level format, IIRC, data is unrecoverable.

Thanks, I did a recover pgm last night and found 9 gigs of data but I screwed something up and have to do it again tonight. I hope that will work.