yep, slinger, he's right. When you reformat you dont actually ERASE anything. You write a brand new (but empty) top level directory on the disk and the control data - which provided you are using the same filesystem type (ie reformatting ntfs as ntfs, or FAT as FAT, not switching) always goes in the same space it did before so isnt going to touch your data. The recovery programs simply refuse to believe the directory saying "this space is empty" and go to look. There is, however, no guarantee that the new OS you install on your reformatted disk will be in the same areas of the disk it was in before the reformat - so you wont get everything back, just most of it. Any file where any part of it has been overwritten by the reinstall of the OS will not be recoverable. Just dont even BOTHER trying to recover progs, save the data and docs then reinstall the progs - it makes sure they actually have a consistent set of libraries and config data registered with the OS. After that pull your data and docs back in from wherever you saved them.
