Recover formatted or FDISK hard drive or partition

[Jakeblues]

Long story, but i have a friend who was upgrading to a newer version of windows and apparently did something bad..and then had somebody else come over to help out, and i haven't been able to get a straight answer from them whether they formatted or fdisked the hard drive. I've done some research...found a program that is now defunct from Powerquest called "lost and found", says about accidentally formatting a hard drive and recovering it..but nobody says anything about if it was fdisk'd...from what i've been able to gather..formatting just messes with the FAT and therefore the hard drive doesn't know where files are and acts like they're not there..but i don't know what fdisking does. I've done it a million times and know what it's used for, but in reality what does the operation do..thanks for any help

 

[Bglad]

fdisk wipes the partition and header info from the drive. Thus, you have lost all header and location data of files that were on the drive. Yes, the files were still there, but you cannot find their location, size, etc. There are companies that can recover data but it is VERY expensive. If you have run fdisk, I don't think there are any retail products that will be very successful at recovery.