HELP!!! Accidently formatted a mission-critical hard drive!

[Biscuitsjam]

My dad runs a business from his home computer. We were trying to reformat a hard drive and reinstall Windows. Unfortunately, we picked the wrong drive.

Instead of just reformating the disk with his program files, we reformated the one with all his data files. Here's what we did:

Data existing (15+ gigabytes on a 500gB eSATA hard drive)
Full Format (NTFS)
Windows Install + a small amount of software + 2gB paging file (5 gigabytes)
Quick Format (NTFS)
Windows Install + 2gB paging file (4 gigabytes)
-smack selves in forehead-

There are a lot of data recovery tools out there. We found tax data and a critical excel spreadsheet with one of them.

What we REALLY need is to recover my dad's emails from the past month. Everything was in a microsoft outlook .pst file that was 1.8 gigabytes in size. None of the tools that I've found have found even a shred of it. My guess is that the file was heavily fragmented. Some of it is probably gone for good, but much of it should still be present.

What's the best disk recovery software for Microsoft Outlook files?

 

[sciencewhiz]

what's your budget?

 

[Biscuitsjam]

What should it be?

Guaranteed-fix, I'd be willing to pay a lot, moreso if the recovery was possible within the next week. I'm not sure how much I'm willing to gamble on a maybe-fix, but I'd consider any option that I came across.

 

[Billb2]

Hundreds, at least.
Supposed to be good... http://savemybutt.com/
There are others.

Depending on where on the drive the files you need were, writing over the data (with the Windows install and other files) could make it much harder/expensive to recover what you need, if it can be done at all.

 

[TheoPetro]

I think theres a company called disksavers that may be able to help you. They quoted me ~9000 when my hdd died. Needless to say I did not end up using them.

 

[Blazer]

more than you are willing to pay would be my guess.

the lesson is donot play with critial data systems, it should be handled by someone with kno-how, who would have backed up everything to start with!!!!!!!

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Just wait for him to post the, well we used this software (insert http site here) with the outstanding price.

 

[Blazer]

yea, lots of the probs here are self inflicted, and should have been avoided.

 

[PowerEngineer]

Is it possible that your dad's ISP (or the Outlook mail server at work) still has the e-mails?

:Q

 

[bwatson283]

If it is a PST file it is likely that the emails are no longer on the server and were 100% downloaded to the PST file. It was POP3 right?

 

[Markbnj]

Problem with a .PST is that if any of it has been walked on the file is probably going to be tough to open. The recovery company might be handing you back text fragments, so set your expectations accordingly.

 

[Fingolfin269]

This is not a good Christmas story OP. I hope you get everything recovered ASAP.

 

[Navid]

This very much sounds like a made-up story just in order to advertise a software product.

You post a message and claim that you lost your data. It just happens that your user account only has 1 or 2 posts!
Then, you or someone else (which also happens to have only a few posts) posts a link to a product that can solve the problem.


If this is really a legitimate problem, you have learned a good lesson: Do not run a business if you do not know how!
Have you never heard of BACKUP?

 

[Plester]

Originally posted by: Navid
This very much sounds like a made-up story just in order to advertise a software product.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

Otherwise good luck and please thank all these nice people for not calling you a dumba$$.