Had to reinstall windows

[Gripper]

does anyone know of a program that would retrieve stuff from the hard drive that I re installed.
Teach me to back stuff up!

[T0TAL-RECALL]

File Recover 6.0

You will need to find it on torrents or Newsgroups since its partly locked if you use trial version...

Anyways its not guranteed to find what your looking for and even if it does it may not be able to recover all the data.

This is how HDD works...

[][][][][][1][2][3][4][5][][][][][]
[][][][][][][][][][][1][2][3][4][]

Ok the [] are blank data blocks and the numbers are data stored... When you use Uninstall it does not remove anything infact it just changes the data block back to [] and hides the data.

[][][][][][1][2][3][4][5][][][][][]
[][][][][][][][][][][][][][][]

So when you install something new it see's that data block as available and will write over the data already stored there.

So with your case since you reformatted the chances of finding the data intact is quite small since the data blocks more than likley were written over.

[peat moss]

Use a program like Norton Ghost and a DVD burner to save yourself some grief . Then you just boot from the disk and your back to square one .

Or save your important files to dvd or cd , then again that's not fool proof either ,as I found out using RW disks .

[Virtualbody1234]

Create a separate partition or even a separate drive for your data. Keep everything that you would want to save out of the system partition (C: ).

That way if you have to format C: then you won't lose everything.

It's also a good idea to backup more important things to CD or DVD because hard drives do fail.

[FreeDoom]

I used a little prog Recover2000 and recovered a lot of my files after i've formated the disk.
File Recover is very good also.

Backup the data to DVD's (good quality ones) is the best strategy though...

[Gripper]

Thanks for all the good advice,used a program I found called admin pack2006,it's very good.
I shall try to follow the sage advice that was offered.

[CortexRock]

I'd suggest shelling out for an additional SATA drive, and setting up a RAID1 array, so you get multiple redundancy if one drive fails, you've got an identical backup.

Gripper - I've got 200gb SATA150 drive up for grabs if you want it, lemme know mate