Recovering data from a formatted hard drive....

Hi folks.....
data loss is every computer user's nightmare.it may happen from virus attack,accidental format(in my friends case its what happened),or from physical damage...one i was enjoying a sunday one of my friend come to my room with a sad face saying that he accidently formatted his HD what he tried is to format a partition in which he installed linux but some how he lost all the partitions exept C He had a huge collection of technical stuff and dont want to loose it. i want to help him so did a bit of googling for harddisk recovery most of the results came up where sites of professional
companies who want thousands of $ for their software. skimming through the results i finally came across one interesting piece of software "test disk" its free hard disk recovery software. its really amazing its actually a command prompt program it dont have good GUI but it worked!!!!!

but working with it for the first time is really difficult it took me about 8 hours to get it working.... you can download the software from here

if have accidently formatted your hard disk make sure that you dont install
any new software or copy any new file to the hard drive this is because the computer actually dont deleate the file from the hard disk at the moment you delete it will delete only when you ask it to save some data and there are no free locations available,else computer will simply delete the file from the 'file allocation table' so that the OS cant see it and if possible do not try to run any recovery software from that hard disk connect it to any other computer and run the software on that( btw that is what i have done....)

i have attempted this on winXP their site says the have linux versions also but i have never tried it....
download the windows XP version of the test disk its a zip file unzip it. you will see a folder named " win" inside that there wll be tow executables namely "photorec_win" and "testdisk_win" the first one can be used to recover deleted files and the latter will allow you to recover the whole partition........