Thorough data recovery program

[SweetGerald]

I'm looking for a very thorough data recovery program. I'm not even sure if it's possible to get the data i'm looking for, but basically i had some files on an OLD hard drive that has been reformatted, repartitionted, formatted to FAT16, back to NTFS, written over and deleted several times. So i don't know if it's possible to get any of that data back, but i'm just looking for the best program to do something like that.

(i know there's another thread on this a few down but didn't wanna piggyback on it)

 

[lxskllr]

I don't know, but I think you're SOL. If anything could be retrieved, it would be by professionals, and cost many hundreds/thousands of dollars assuming they were even willing to try.

 

[boochi]

Once the data has be written over there is no program that will be able to recover it. You may be able to retrieve data if the disk has been reformatted or partitioned using GetDataBack or Recuva. Once data has been physically overwritten by new data, recovery can only be achieved by using extraordinary measures. This would require disassembly of the drive and platter removal. Platters would then be read using much more sophisticated equipment.

 

[smakme7757]

After 3 rewrites i think it's almost impossible for consumer software to get anything back.

So i'm inclined to agree with lxskllr

 

[Berryracer]

you can't do it, end of story, you've over written of teh d4t4 clusters

 

[seepy83]

The correct answer to your question actually depends on whether or not the entire disk has been written/overwritten. If I have a 100 MB disk that's absolutely full of data, and I format it, then write only 5 MB of data to it, delete that 5MB of data, and format it again, then there's a pretty good chance that I can still recover 95MB of the original data. I'm not positive if going from NTFS to FAT16 to NTFS has any bearing on that, but I suspect it does not.