Had to erase HD and reinstall - can I recover file?

[mitya33]

My HD recently got corrupted, beyond the powers of the disk repair utility, and I had to reinstall the OS.

I erased the HD of its current content first, but in a way that, it said, would allow certain clever disk programs to retrieve the files later (i.e. I didn't zero or 7-style erase the disk).

The question is: how do retrieve? I installed something called Wondershare Data Recovery, but that's not currently giving me any love. I've heard of Data Warrior but they want lots of money and don't offer a free trial, which, given I have no guarantee it will actually do anything, is not an overly attractive idea.

Am I doomed?

Thanks in advance

 

[Kaveman]

never had any joy recovering files once the drive has been re-written to on that scale.

 

[mitya33]

Well that's what I would have thought, but if so, what's the point of the different erase options? It explicitly says that one method allows certain programs to retrieve data, whilst other methods ensure the data is truly gone for good.

 

[Kaveman]

The data is written onto the disk in blocks, these blocks are indexed into Files for access by the OS, erasing the drive destroys the Files, but the blocks with the data can be recovered.

Back in the old days of 800k disks I rebuild some Excel spreadsheets via piecing the block together, but there was only a few blocks with data on the disk. Today on a modern drive you have millions of blocks, storing millions of files. Yes, it can be done. If you have the time and money. It is not a simple switch you can turn, sorry.

Our workshop has 2 expensive pieces of software that can "try" and recover files. We have a standard bench fee of $300 before we will even start the job, it is so likely to fail and takes so long to do.

Sorry, but not having a backup in todays age of cheap drives and irreplaceable digital media is very sad.